OK. OK, so starting with any question on any topic that we have talked, the first module, second module, because this is the last session, unfortunately. Anything that you guys have question before I start? I have a kind of question. Let's see if it's related. I've been reading the work of Gilbert Simondon in Individuation. And I think his work was quite influential for Chatelet and René Thon.
And I am particularly interested in how he sees that the notion of form deserves to be replaced by the notion of information. So regarding the hierarchical picture of complexity, I would like to know your opinion about this replacement of form by information, particularly in relation to your conception of abstraction, of what abstraction is. Obstruction in what sense? In the sense that if I am understanding well,
your developing of abstraction as a kind of dialectic between form from. Oh, OK, OK, OK. Abstraction, OK, in terms of OK, OK, OK. Yeah, well, I mean, the thing is that it doesn't really replace form and this is something that Tom talks about yes it's kind of form is no longer becomes you know as purely platonic abstracts agenda namely an ideal form but it's precisely because it's an individuating process the morphogenetic of form is basically a stabilization of information regarding
you know, what has preceded it in terms of the structure and functioning. So, and again, this stability shouldn't be understood as kind of ideal static stability. It's a dynamic morphogenetic stability in the sense that it is capable of further basically diversifying and also creating not an autonomous downward causation but in a certain sense a functional, basically, influence on its deeper levels, in micro-levels, intermediate levels. And that's distinguished the morphogenetic instability of individuated organizations
in Thaum, Simon Duhn, or Chatelet, mostly actually Thaum, from the kind of platonic understanding. And this brings back to the idea that forms can never be idealized or purely extracted from material contamination, namely material constraints. And Charlotte talks about this in terms of the separation of physics and mathematics in Aristotelian categorization, that basically mathematics verges on pure form and physics goes toward pure motion. And basically, the whole Aristotelian following Plato's
lead is really the abstraction of pure form of mathematics from that of physics, which, of course, Shatlet tries to undermine by showing that, oh, where did Miguel go? He disappeared. So, OK, yes. OK, I think he's back. So yeah, the thing is that Shatlet shows that mathematical concepts by no means can extract themselves from the contamination of physics.
And the contamination of physics simply expresses basically the role of representational abstraction and conceptual abstraction. And this representational abstraction is concerning, like, for example, movements, basically. And we talked about it, that movement is simply a form of simulation of a space. You diversify and proliferate abstractions of a space, of physical space, and then this physical space then carried into the mathematical domain, and the mathematical domain, what Kant talks about that geometrical space is no longer the physical space,
and this is the core of mathematics, that it enrichens and it broadens different senses of a space. required for any kind of consequential traction on basically the physical science, how it regards physical space and physical spatial-temporal field. So basically this all comes to this, that abstraction in this sense is no longer the extraction of pure form. It's not as if you are, the materiality is dead and you are kind of, you have at liberty to remove, and that's what abstraction is, removing, the process of removing.
removing form from that dead material or dead spatial extension. And so far, this becomes the definition of the abstraction par excellence. The abstraction is really that entanglement between material behaviors that guide basically thinking that guide that procedure of abstraction as removing of idea or concepts from the material domain, but also guided on another level by the laws of thought, by the rules of inference. And again, according to Kant, there is a third criteria in abstraction, and that's imagination,
basically rules of schemas, geometrical proliferation of the sense of space, figures of space. So its abstraction then becomes, this morphogenetic abstraction then becomes an expression of entanglement between material behaviors, rules of thought, and rules of imagination, with the understanding that pure idea can never be abstracted because abstraction itself is guided by those material constraints that govern the rules of thoughts in the process of abstraction. This, for example, is like that Archimedean experiment with the top,
in order to gauge if the votive crown is real or not. It's a process of abstraction. He basically puts himself as a thinking subject inside a material under a virtual gesture. He puts himself in a place of a gourd of water. and by basically sensing, perceiving the forces of the material domain, which is the system of water, a volume of water on its body, then it's capable of basically gluing the rules of thought to an actual physical system.
And through that, he's capable of abstracting, for example, the idea of mass versus volume. So abstraction in this sense becomes precisely a gesture that is always pregnated with material behaviors, material behaviors that constrain the rules of thought. Okay, thank you. It's really helpful. I mean the whole idea is that it's an abstraction in a very general sense is a compression of
information compression because we talked about this as compression simply when information is compressed in a complex system, it's where new functions basically are born. So compression is a computational criteria for emergence of new functionalities. An abstraction is simply the proliferation of functional capacities, computational functional capacities. But this compression is precisely works by way of structural constraints. For example, certain information are thrown away. Certain information are qualitatively
changed according to these rules of structure, which are already in place, for example, in the physical system. And this is what Chatelette gets at, but never talks about it in terms of modern understanding of abstraction as computational compression. in terms of that abstraction is always contaminated by material. It's basically a form of mobility. And when we are talking about mobility, gestures and mobility, virtual mobility, we are talking about that entanglement between concepts of mathematics and material behaviors
which undergird physics proper. And these two can never be separated from one another. They can be separated from one another in terms of basically their conceptual representational frameworks, but underlying principles, there is basically a tension between them, and that tension is the source of that contamination. Maybe I want to maybe test an idea or something and see, thinking about this idea of compression. I mean, wouldn't kind of the sort of manifest apprehension
apprehension of particular qualities in the world be a kind of like evolutionarily efficient means of compression of certain sort of, you know, processes in the world. Yeah, and that's exactly what many, I mean, this is exactly what Ronan Thurman and other than Ronan Thurman, Alan Berthoud talk about that. In fact, abstraction, I mean, from an evolutionary perspective can be traced back to a sense of space, basically a spatial abstraction, the very understanding that the nervous system is capable of creating a designated discontinuity in the organism so that the organism can establish a sense of internal continuity and then contrast it with basically a space with understanding
that there is no given sense of space for the organism. Basically, space is something that does not distinguish itself from itself. this contrastation basically the first impulse of abstractions comes to life and that's exactly how the organism in a very rudimentary way is capable of making sense of its environment simulating basically a space through mobilizing itself in a very embodied way in the environment that's exactly that that whole example of brain is a motion simulating device. In more evolved organisms, what you need in order to simulate motion, and you are capable of optimally acting according to the simulation,
the simulation is a form of abstraction, is you need to, the evolved organism need to have ocular system to detect shifts in light and a vestibular system in order to stabilize basically, in order to detect an inertial frame of reference for the organism. So how it works is that a predator is capable of detecting a shift in light. That's what eye is for. This can be caused by anything. For example, you know, an obstruction of light, a movement. And then eye or the IQLR system cannot see this basically as a trajectory of movement.
And what ocular system does is simply turn this shift in light into an ocular cue, a retinal cue. Then the vestibular system, which is the inner ear, the function of the vestibular system is that it basically makes a sense of the inertia gravitational field. And that's what inner ear is, that it always functions, always under the influence of the Earth's gravitational field. And basically, the organism uses this as a global frame of reference for itself, as an inertial frame of reference. Once the predator puts its body in motion in a space, the output of these two systems,
the ocular system and the vestibular system, the inertial frame of reference, and the retinal cue are synthesized. So the movement of the predator in a space then basically turns into a continuous line, basically a diversion from the inertial frame of reference. Now if the predator is capable of successfully, basically reach the prey, then this continual continuous line that has yielded a target is stabilized by temporal memory. So once it's stabilized by temporal memory, then the predator is capable of basically retrieving this optimal action at any time when confronting with similar situations.
And this is exactly what abstraction is in a broad form of simulation. Now, I guess the next thing is in this sort of scenario of kind of predator and prey, or I mean it doesn't necessarily have to be, I guess, stated in this particular, but anytime... It can be, basically, this is what Son talks about, and also Berthold, that it's just a reproduction cycle basically that these two are the first impulses for an organism survival yeah then it diversifies it diversifies and that's exactly what we talked about that the very moment that nervous system is
capable of simulation the sense of environment and the purpose of organism diversifies well I guess yeah this this sort of vector of attraction or whatever or maybe that you're talking about to make it a little bit perhaps more generalized. I mean, I guess in terms of... Oh, how was I going to put that? I mean, in terms of account... You know, I'm going to have to stop and think this through because I think I had sort of a... But I guess, I mean... Like, if I encounter something over and over again or like a particular sort of stimulus, I mean, I guess one of the things I was bringing up prior to the class was the sort of weird phenomena that seems to have, you know, spread like wildfire through the internet for the past week.
And that's this sort of, like, picture of this dress that, you know, if you look at it in one lighting condition or context, it appears to be blue and black. And then if you look at it in another, it appears to be white and gold. and this sort of changes according to the kind of environmental cues or even according to sort of maybe changes in sort of internal representations of viewing this picture, how you take those cues internally because you can scroll down the page and scroll back up and look at it again and see it differently. So depending on how one is sort of contextually interpreting these cues it can differ. So I guess the path to being able to sort of perceive this kind of local phenomenon in that
whole process between like this sort of retinal apprehension and then like the sort of cognitive tracking of that particular thing changes each time. Like there's a certain sort of nominal state of the entire local process for each time one encounters this particular operation. So I guess I'm saying for moving from that sort of local framework of the kind of process to a sort of more global framework of the invariance between like multiply, many people viewing this like image or even yourself viewing this image under successive sort of states. like is there a way to maybe generalize or abstract further from that without I
guess losing sort of the kind of the sort of different information in each access or you have to have a sort of compression across the kind of various like local interactions? Well, I think this comes back to two different questions. One is that, you know, evolutionary simulation as a very rudimentary representational one is very different from our conceptual
conceptual one. So while the aim of the representational simulation is simply establishing invariance for organism, for the brain, so it can yield minimum action for a given trajectory, the Lagrangian rule. That's basically the law of invariance, minimum action for a given trajectory. And without that it is basically you are incapable of functioning at the level of embodied cognition. But at the level of, I think, conceptual abstraction, yes, basically that's why you need for one range, you need to have multiple different compressions. And that's exactly, you can only have that kind of abstraction
through assimilating representation by conceptual systems of language. Basically, no abstraction, no simulation, no organic or embodied simulation is capable of proliferating the sense of abstraction without having that conceptual system, without language. And that's why language is simply a catastrophe for the organism in terms of functionality. It creates a discontinuity with basically evolutionary representational system that allows for broadening the range of compressions because it's a social phenomenon. No longer laws of invariance hold there.
So like the, I mean, I guess when you approach something through a system of language, I mean, even in this predator-prey sort of situation that you're talking about, there's a kind of abstraction of the sort of entity that one is tracking. And there's a kind of extraction of that from background data. And so a sort of compression immediately occurs where you're distinguishing this sort of like foreground figure. Yeah, which is basically when you do it, it's completely on the level of rudimentary appearances that your organism, your heuristic bias, takes the upper hand. I was going to say, I think this is interesting in terms of like maybe sort of manifest notions
like color again in terms of like blue or red as kind of like identifying like, you know, a certain sort of like perceptual range for organisms. And while it may be that something like blue does not really exist out there in the world, but is kind of a description of a certain sort of invariance in a process between organisms and their encounter in the world with, you know, certain stimuli, it still seems like that term is capable in some way of being mapped onto something that might be described in more of like a kind of distinctly scientific process. Yeah, I think so.
But I mean, it's very interesting that in these kinds of, you know, any kind of perceptual illusion, it's definitely, the majority of these illusions are simply products of heuristic biases. And heuristic biases are not simply representational, but also memory-driven. It's precisely because, you know, that invariants are stabilized by memory, and we use them in order to deploy our concepts. And once, if, and that's exactly what, you know, in a broader scope, it has like, creates basically epistemic dogmas, that if you simply move toward, use your, basically, prior knowledge
of a phenomenon, of similar phenomenon, in order to interpret a phenomenon, whether it's similar or not. This bearing upon of prior knowledge on whatever you are interacting with is exactly what doxastic conservatism is, which is a form of heuristic bias. And That's why I think embodied cognition, you need to be very careful. While it is extremely useful to approach so many of, you know, representational conceptual interaction through embodied cognition, but nevertheless, the really dangerous part of
it is heuristic bias, the role of the memory and also the role of embodiment. The role of embodiment is always being evolutionary consequent, constituted and evolutionary determined. And that's why I think that's many people who use these kinds of proponents of abductive inference, who see abductive inference as presentential form of inference, namely exactly an embodied form of inference, then that doesn't really exactly tell us why, for example, abductive inference is capable of yielding completely new knowledge. Because yielding new knowledge precisely marks that discontinuity
of our epistemic method with our accumulated or prior knowledge. But if abductive inference as presentential inference is simply a form of embodied cognition, then how can we really mark that discontinuity? Because embodied cognition, embodied inference is always tinged with that evolutionary constituted and determined form of epistemic approach.
I mean, I guess this is why I'm thinking you need to be able to couple this with this sort of coherent disposition of sellers and that sort of synoptic vision of blending together the manifest and the scientific images because you have this sort of consistent updating of the sort of like... Yeah, sure. The rhetorical commitments that one is making in terms of how your embodied cognition is relating to the kind of history that you've established. Yes, and with the understanding that for Solaresian schema, this complex interpolate between representation
taking place in the order of the real or isomorphic between natural objects and concepts taking place in the order of thought or isomorphic in linguistic objects, the more this interaction happens representations you are capable of basically it shouldn't be conflated with this idea that your concepts become representations know your concepts become more efficient to abstract basically or to diversify sense of those atomic level representation that's the most important thing that concepts nature of concepts is never replaced. It's the content of concept that is updated. Yes.
Not quite. I mean, language in its kind of particular form, again, like I was saying, maybe perhaps is a kind of plastic form, whether it's spoken or written. And, you know, I mean, that, its content is updated, but we are still kind of left with the same sort of, you know, manifest perceptible threshold in regards to language's sort of mode of representation. And yet we're able to kind of, you know, add to its sort of conceptual or contentful repertoire. are so it seems like I guess we should be able to do this with other sort of
plastic forms as well you know non-linguistic ones yes well I I don't know I mean I think language shouldn't be seen as kind of like the kind of natural language that we are talking about but the most important thing it's It's really, I think it's, we need to understand it as in order for you to be able to cogitate, you need to have an entanglement between continuity of representations and discrete manipulability of symbolic repertoires. And when it comes to basically manipulability in order to diversify sense of representations,
metal representations, you need computational effectivity, hence discrete components, syntactical components of basically semantic assertability. That's what I think any kind of system that wants to replace or kind of supplement language, we need to think about in terms of its computational effectivity. Is there any other system that has this kind of computational effectivity because it is manipulable and the reason that this is manipulable in such a plastic way is because simply it is a discretized system of symbols.
And that's exactly what Turing's point is. But of course Turing's fault pushes it toward the extreme. It simply flattened the entire continuity, discontinuity interplay, moves it toward complete decomposition of semantic to discrete units. Not understanding and not basically working on this idea that how basically the interplays between representations, between continuous representations and discrete linguistic syntax is done by way of, for example, the pragmatic dimension that allows for you to move back and forth
between continuity and discontinuity, decomposing an assertion to its set of, for example, discrete components or discrete trajectories and then again, recapsulating these discrete components back again to a continuous entity. This movement, I think, this is what is the most important thing. And as far as we are dealing with, there is probably no other alternative system that gives us the same computational effectivity, to be able to move between composition and decomposition
of continuity of representations and discontinuity of basically syntax. Yeah, I don't think that they should be totally fused together and say that one thing is like the other. I guess it's more maybe a kind of question maybe of what the sort of function of the thing is in a sort of linguistic type of format or functioning somewhat like a language yet not. I mean, this is maybe where this sort of like abductive kind of work comes in. But I don't know. I've been kind of working on the edge of this right now, and I don't want to take up any
more time and I think you're no this is an interesting question that's ultimately comes to question that's language plays a key role in the evolution of cognition in a social pragmatic sense but is there also a possibility for the evolution of language from what already we identify with it. And that's the most important thing in the sense that there will be a different vocabulary for abstraction rather than those vocabularies that are posed and, you know, constructed by way of language. Yeah, that's, I think, an open question.
Questions? Yeah, I do have a question because I'm trying to line up the terminology here in the model that you're speaking of, predator and prey and so on, with something else that comes to mind from Matzola, which is the concept of what he calls stemma or genealogy of performance. genealogy, the example that he uses is like you're preparing a particular piece of classical music and so the stemma is basically all the times that you've practiced that piece. So it has to do with the function of memory, but maybe it's a more plastic, you know, it's
non-linguistic process, it's just one solo performance. So I'm thinking of the catastrophic and the apocalyptic, those two terms that you introduced for temporal experience along with the temporal memory in the process of abstraction. Could that be a solution or something One more time, one more time, this last part of your question. Okay, I will try my best. Last week you spoke of the catastrophic as opposed to the apocalyptic notions,
or I think it was related with Kronos and Eon. Yes. Yes, so the genealogy of the performance, it's an experience of times developing towards a target, I guess, through just the concept of memory or the experience of temporal memory, which is like abstraction in what you're saying here. Yes. I guess I'm trying, I'm missing, I think there's like another half. When you talk about language as a catastrophic experience for the organism, I'm wondering sort of what the apocalyptic experience would be and if the Stemma model could work for something like that.
Well, a couple of things. I think that, yes, I understand that people like Matsula and some other people who are talking about gesture talk about the non-linguisticness of gestures or practices. But I think that we need to be very careful when something is non-linguistic. Because when we are talking about non-linguisticness of these actions or gestures, we are referring to kind of basically brain episodes or mental episodes that are basically opaque to the subject. We don't have access to these mentalists. We don't have access to non-linguistic
status of... That was exactly what we talked about in terms of the myth of the given, that We don't have access to representations outside of our semantic, basically, domain, which is the interlinguistic one. If we say that we have access to it, we are risking a variation of the semantic given that basically these acts, these gestures tell us something, and they are guiding us in a certain way. But that's exactly not the case. We are buying into it. We are buying into the form of myth of the given in the negative sense. But yes, I can see that, for example,
yes, the gestures probably are more in line with exactly that kind of durational time that we talked about, chronic time. not in the sense of it does not establish that kind of discontinuity that, for example, concepts pose for a subject or an organism. And this is precisely because gestures are embodied abstraction rather than working. They express entanglements between the physical space and conceptual repertoire of language or cognition.
But I don't know about this apocalyptic one, because apocalyptic time is about teleology. It's basically the revelation of a final cause, in a sense. That's what apocalypse is. is showing the telos of, for example, an action or a purpose. But I don't see that gestures really have a telos. The repetition of gestures may be repeated repetition, like towards a ritual or even what the Confucian concept of the ceremony as the support of the cognitive capacity of the state.
Yes, but these are not telus exactly. They are rational ceremony, and that's exactly what Confucianism talks about. These are rational or moral ends. Moral ends are different from the natural telus. They are not teleogenic in the sense that they basically have an... And that's exactly why they cannot be mechanistically explained. This is the difference between what we talked about, norm of action, norm of action being different from norm of functioning, because norm of functioning are about what is the case, whereas rational norms or norms of action, norm of practical reason are about what should
be done. That should be done according to basically an autonomous system of conceptualization, an autonomous form of practical reasoning. That's what autonomy is. You create your own basically ends or purposes and you then try to elaborate a certain instrumentality or utilities to reach this end. But this by means that it's apocalyptic, in the sense that there is a final cause. In fact, rational ends, or performance, or ceremony, and that's what exactly sagehood is for Neo-Confucianism, does never end. Because if it ends, if it reaches a telus, a natural telus, means that it attains perfection.
And that's what basically the final causes are, you know, the unity of the soul with the intellect, for example, in that sense. But whereas the rational end can always be modified, there is always a room for further cultivation, for further perfection. Where the rational end expresses the absence of natural telus, then we can't really regard this purpose in rational purpose or rational end, we can't address it in the context of apocalypse or apocalyptic time, basically the revelation of a final unity between this
and that, a reconciliation. Especially for Zhongsan, this is one of the biggest problems as in contrast to Buddhism and uses it as a critique of Buddhism. I don't go into details, but for Buddhism, not for all Buddhism, for kind of a general landscape of the Buddhistic thought, is that this process of moving toward purpose or unity with the purpose basically concludes the process of stature. You are sage, you become sage, and that's it. I mean, you remain sage. But for Zhongsan, this is completely impossible,
that sagehood is a process of self-cultivation of the collective agency. Insofar as reaching one destination gestures toward another destination. I mean, this is like the Bodhisattva in another kind of Buddhism. where as opposed to reaching sagehood as an individual, you would work towards the collective sagehood of all sentient beings. Is that what... No, Jong-san doesn't talk about unity of all sentient beings. I think that's exactly what makes it appealing,
because, you see, he uses precisely his teacher, Shian Shili, is somehow a functionalist. He sees humans under the concept of function. That function is not precisely reason, theoretical reasoning, but practical reasoning, namely the understanding of the capacity for attaining moral good. And what distinguishes human from other sentient beings is simply following these functions. Basically, they are characterized by their capacity to institute socially the moral good.
And that does not allow relapsing back, you know, to basically to overexpand this idea of moral good thing out, notion of agency, and basically expanding it to other sentient beings. Basically, again, like Hegel, a spirit, or for Zhongsan, sagehood, it starts from the human. and human is simply its beginning. Rather than starting from the evolution, basically it results in the complete unification of all sentient beings. No, the collectivization only moves forward by organization of either a rational agency for Hegel
or collective organization of moral agencies for Jung-sen. I mean, this is, I think, again, comes back to the problem that we talked about last session that, you know, any kind of identification of agency as a thing risks always thinning out the notion of agency. And once we thin out the notion, the concept of agency, we are simply incapable of adjudicating any claim that what this agency should do or what it is entitled to. And that's why Kant talks about agency not in terms of a thing but in terms of an activity.
And because if you, and this is in order to distinguish one agency on the basis of its activity, but also stopping or halting the functional regress. That if you basically ascribe this activity that distinguishes agency to everything in the universe, then you are creating an agentic impotency for Kant. Basically, you are risking heteronomy. And the solution for dysfunctional regress, to stop dysfunctional regress, is that functions are attributed not to things, but to activities. And these activities have
you know, fuzzy demarcations. Right. Okay. Well, thank you. Thanks for speaking about that. I'm still left hanging a little bit with the apocalyptic time notion, but I think... I mean, kind of like the best way to think about it is I mean, apocalypse, technically understood, is a time in which the ultimate telus is revealed. Okay. Because, why is that it's the ultimate telus? Because it's a time that is completely determined by its origin.
Basically, the ultimate, because the goal of time, the reality of time, is simply exhausted in what has already taken place, the origin. So the ultimate telus is simply the unification with the origin. And that's exactly what the entire Aristotelian and No-Platonist thing is. It's the unity or reconciliation of soul and the nos. Because the nos is put in the origin rather than put into basically the destination, the excess of destinations over the origin. It's that, I will talk about this today, it's that basically the expression of this metaphysical bias of time that what has already taken place is basically time.
So you were kind of... It's already written in the origin. And in order for us to move forward, we need to create basically a kind of path or procedure to be capable of reconciliation with this origin, with this ultimate goal that has already prescribed for us. Okay. Yeah, so just as you were speaking, I was thinking, so this is a structural notion of time as opposed to the catastrophic which is more of like a functional its up
no I mean well structure function we were talking about the spirit it's the it's a different between time as subsisting as such and time as belonging when we are talking about time as belonging then this is that becomes a story greeting at one of the story to reading of time in which the living subject, the agent, is always at the risk of interpreting basically how to move ahead by prioritizing the ontologization of the origin. Basically this is basically metaphysical bias that what has already taken place shouldn't
be ontologized as basically as a fundamental aspect of time. In the historic reading of time we talked about that basically the chronic reading of time is that you have a present as basically as a contractible, infinitely contractible and infinitely expandable extension. So the present can have infinite past and it can have infinite future. But the thing is that this infinite past or infinite future is not really the past or future of time as such, time as subsisting, but simply the past of the present extension
or the future of the present extension. Right. This is a really good article on this, is John Sellar's article in, I think, Collapse 3 called something about Deleuze and the stoic season. Right, right. The eon, the chronic and eon. Yes. Exactly. Okay. That's great. That's great. Well, thank you for taking my question there. I don't want to hold up the rest of your talk, though. OK. Thank you. OK, so if no question, I mean, we can move forward,
and then we'll have questions. Miguel, do you have a question? Hello? Can you hear me? Can anybody hear me? Yes. Okay. So let's get to our discussion. I think this idea of time, and this is something that we'll talk about a little bit today, today is interesting and it's basically comes down to we talked about it in terms of you know metaphysics of intelligence that basically meta intelligence needs to be understood as
adaptation to time but in so far as intelligence is capable is defined by constituting its history and that's exactly what an intelligence that strives to remain intelligent is, basically the intelligibility of agency as a project. Insofar as intelligence is capable of constituting its history, this adaptation to time is no longer, we can no longer solely define it can no longer solely define it in terms of the vocabulary, the mechanistic vocabulary, or the empirical vocabulary of adaptation to time, namely a structural evolution, which biological evolution is also part of it.
And we talked about it in terms of the risk order, namely adaptation, transformative adaptation to the access of destinations over the origin. Because from this metaphysical perspective, we can't exhaust the reality of time by simply seeing time in the origin or what has already taken place. Just because something, and this also reflects in the idea that past is always taken more real than the future,
than basically present to the future past. But just because something has left empirical footprints, namely from the past to the present, doesn't mean that it is not real. And that's exactly, yes, in terms the you know the succession of event we can talk about past we should in fact recognize past and that's what the spirit does but we cannot ontologize this dimension because ontologization of origin or the past from the present is simply a metaphysical bias against time. As if we are saying that the telus of
time the reality of time is exhausted by an origin now sorry I don't have slides and then I wanted to share my notes but there I'm afraid are way embarrassingly chaotic for me to share them. So, following Hegel, the most consequential event in the history of intelligence is this structural transformation and the formation of new self-consciousness. We talked about this. And this new self-consciousness
is really historical self-consciousness that coincides with the advent of modernity. Achieving an explicit historical understanding of the genesis of one's current stage is how one moves to the next. But we talked about it. I just want to kind of bring back what I mentioned in the last session. We talked about that this moving from one stage to another, according to this explicit historical understanding or historical self-consciousness, for Hegel is not precisely a linear progression.
It's the diagonal one, precisely because a spirit recognizes its past in order to determinately negate it. The concatenacy of recognition and negation and determinate negation is a constructive principle in which every sequence of transformation becomes non-bijective to the previous one. Simply you cannot, if the sequence of transformation is no longer entailed in the iteration of this past recognition or recognition of the past estates,
This means that spirit cannot solely be understood in terms of its reflective capacities, basically how it reflects upon its past states in order to move forward. historical self-consciousness is a distinct form of self-consciousness in which the self is capable of recognizing its past transformation and conceptions or narratives to not only revise or abundant them but most importantly to employ its epoch-making transformations by employing norms of practical and
theoretical reasoning passed onto it from its basically past. We talked about that basically one of the things about practical reasoning is that these practical reasonings can be seen as some sort of functional entrenchment that they surpass the life of the agent and ensure that the intelligibility of the agency can be maintained as a project. A project that basically endures beyond the life of particular agents. And that's where basically the ultimate intelligibility of an agent lies in this project, in the cultivation
of this project. In a sense, rather than constructing from scratch, social intelligence evolves by entrenching its functions rather than its structures, further reinforcing and augmenting its functional evolution. In Hegelian terms, this functional entrenchment suggests building on the modern, differently structured kinds of institutions, practices, and self-conscious selves, ones that are normatively superior because they embody a greater self-consciousness or a deeper understanding of the kind of being we are and how we can be transformed. But as I argued, the augmentation of this functional dimension results in the weakening
of the structural constitution. Indeed, weakening of the determinative power of the structural constitution over function is simply the beginning for the history of intelligence and its functional evolution. To us, modernity might be a belated phenomenon, but to intelligence, it's simply the embryonic beginning. Hey, Reza, you're starting to make your voice go a little crazy there. Can you? Okay, okay, okay. One second.
OK, can you hear me? That's perfect. Thank you. OK. So, OK, I'll repeat. what I just said, weakening of the determinative power of the structural constitution over function is simply the beginning for the history of intelligence and its functional evolution. To us, modernity might be a belated phenomenon,
but to intelligence, it's simply the embryonic beginning. Because we talked about this, that basically modernity is simply the advent of historical self-consciousness as opposed to mere self-consciousness. And once you have historical self-consciousness, it's exactly where basically agency as a project can be realized. That agency is capable of initiating transformations by having historical conceptions of itself. Intelligence ultimately needs to be understood
as a project capable of constituting its own demands, its own basically ends that might not be even compatible with its natural constitution, then advent of modernity as establishment of historical consciousness is simply the beginning of the functional evolution of intelligence. And Hegel talks about this in terms of the three-stage evolution of a spirit. The first one, which is the conduct, simply the individual self-consciousness. The modernity as being historical self-consciousness. and postmodernity. When I'm saying postmodernity,
I don't mean it in the sense of postmodernism, but more in the sense of Leotard and also Hegel, that what basically a spirit that is endowed with historical self-consciousness can do to itself. This is basically the passage from modernity for Hegel to absolute knowing. And the first one, the first rudimentary stage or primitive shape of a spirit is the sphere of conduct or ethos. Modernity is alienation.
And then the modernity to beyond postmodernity is basically the combination of both ethos in its collective sense informed by historical consciousness and alienation in order basically to use this alienation as a condition of enablement to move further. And Hegel is usually addressed as being the prophet of the second stage. Properly understood, modernity is the consciousness of how to constitute history as our own or the Geist's act.
apprehending itself in its interpretation of itself to itself the recognition of the principle that the completion of apprehension at one stage is at the same time the rejection of that stage and its transition to the next but in so far as intelligence cannot realize itself without history and history we talked about we need to be very strict about this definition. History, in this sense, is the capacity to constitute a sequence of self-transformation and not merely a past. But in so far as intelligence cannot realize itself without history,
modernity's recognition and mobilization of historical consciousness becomes the starting point for the history of intelligence. Intelligence converts too late of lived temporality into the beginning of its time. For it, the rest of time are only destinations. So it's kind of from an speculative philosophical dimension. It's very interesting that, and this is, again, it's probably not even a kind of discovery of Hegel. We talked about it in terms of cynicism and Stoicism, that this reading of time as subsisting and belonging allows you to make conducts,
make social and individual conduct as if we are simply at the beginning of time. But also, very empirically speaking, 14 billion years is simply nothing in the scope of basically the reality of time. We are really, whether empirically or speculatively, at the beginning of time. But intelligence simply uses this recognition that it is starting from the beginning of time, basically as a form of capacitation, as a form of enablement. This, as we talked about, characterizes one of the distinct features of intelligence. It only evolves by adaptation to the reality of time as excess of destinations over the
origin. Rather than simply perceiving time, the intelligent agency thinks time through practices of self-cultivation. The cognition of time takes place at the level of practice or practical project. And in fact, there is always a good chance that at the level of cognitive inquiry, we become incapable of recognizing the transformative epoch of intelligence or to say where the intelligence is in time. Now, this is, I think, one of the main things that can create a historical, basically, a kind of historical pathology.
If intelligence simply begins by modernity, social intelligence, or intelligence as such, an intelligence that's capable of apprehending its intelligibility, is starting from modernity, then to us moderns, there is always a good chance that simply we lose the track of intelligence, where basically intelligence is and how we can recognize it. Basically, this also comes down to this idea that, you know, I think there is a grain truth to this Gibsonian idea that what if singularity has already happened and we are no longer capable of cognitively recognizing it because it belongs to another form of temporality,
A temporality for whose its beginning is already our too late of history. You know, what we basically moan that, you know, oh, we have gone through this. We have done this. We have been there. We have been there. We have done that. This is exactly, you know, the kind of metaphysical bias that intelligence doesn't buy into. Okay. In other words, since our modern history is precisely the beginning of a strongly functional and autonomous intelligence, we lose the track of intelligence as what surpasses our temporal recognition. If anything, this expresses a defect in our historical consciousness that manifests as a disconnection between our cognitive-recognitive capacities and the evolution of intelligence as such.
This disconnection is between our basically our cognitive capacities and intelligence as that which piece by piece assembles itself from us yet whose history marks the limits of our temporal understanding or temporal recognition. One immediate pathology of this disconnection is that we become impediments to the evolution of intelligence and respectively deprive of our agency of its intelligibility. Since, as I discussed in the previous session, our agency as that which entitles us to things like freedom and the good can only legitimately be established by cultivation of the agency as a project,
aimed at realization of intelligence. We talked about it that no intelligence, no agency, no conception of agency can basically establish a sense of its own intelligibility unless basically it sees itself as a project. Now, of course, I think this brings to a kind of like an interesting question, and that's the question of, I think this is the tangible risk.
There is a good tangible risk. It's not just a risk. something that is already in progress, this disconnection between our recognitive capacities and the evolution of intelligence. And I think in order for it to add, it's hard to overcome this disconnection, but it can be mitigated. And I think there should be a political and sociocultural role that, you know, Collective projects should play in order to mitigate this disconnection. And in fact, any sociopolitical endeavor or consequential project of change, which change being understood as simply a transformation that is historically self-conscious,
must first address this rift or disconnection or discontinuity effect between recognitive capacities and the evolution of intelligence as such, and then devise a necessary course of action in accordance with it. But doing something about this discontinuity effect or disconnection, which is triggered by unanticipated consequences of basically our commitment to agency as a project and the exponentially growing change basically in the normative status
or in the apprehension of the project of itself, namely the evolution of intelligence, is not tantamount to act of restoration. So doing something about discontinuity, mitigating discontinuity, is not simply a restoration. On the contrary, I think the task is to construct kind of points of liaison, both in terms of cognitive inquiry and practical project, so as to enable, in one way or another, synchronize between what we think of ourselves and what is becoming of us,
namely our own historical self-consciousness and the evolution of intelligence that is the product of this historical self-consciousness. the ability to recognize the latter namely what is becoming of us or evolution of intelligence as such is not a given right or an inherent natural aptitude it is in fact a matter of a labor or a program that is fundamentally from any kind of sociocultural political project being human does not entail by any means the ability to connect with the consequences what it means to be human. In the same way,
identifying ourselves as human is neither a sufficient condition for understanding what is becoming of us nor a sufficient condition for recognizing what we are becoming or more accurately, what is being born out of us. Ultimately, the question... So this is some digression into, I think, that historical self-consciousness, adequate historical self-consciousness, means mitigation of pathologies of self-consciousness. Namely, you need a good grasp of history, of past, in order to be able to determinately negate it.
But the thing is that this adequate historical self-consciousness doesn't mean that it does not itself result in pathologies of its own. And again, those pathologies need to be rectified. And this pathology, one of the immediate pathologies of adequate self-consciousness, is that it gives rise to intelligence. It gives rise to social intelligence. And once social intelligence is instigated as a self-apprehending project, there is always a good chance that the recognitive capacities of historical self-consciousness basically lag behind the evolution of intelligence.
And this is something where basically historical self-consciousness then is being used as an excuse to impede the evolution of intelligence. That's exactly what we see in terms of huge amounts of Marxist theory, that we have historical emphasis on historical self-consciousness. The way that we move forward is actually, or the way that we prescribe to move forward, is a form of impediment for the evolution of social intelligence. Question before I move forward. I'm kind of curious in terms of
linking this maybe in terms of heuristic construction I know there's a kind of negative and positive to heuristics because in terms of how they sort of compress understanding they can sometimes become regressive in their form if they're used well past their due date. But I guess I'm wondering if in terms of a kind of practical project and maybe linking the sort of resources we have from history and then moving forward to kind of connecting the capacities of the human to a sort of larger history, which the human capacities are necessarily constrained, And does that mean then the production of certain sort of like heuristic functions that
compress this history but make it easier to access in the present and then build upon that? You've been updating our heuristic practices. Yes. That's a difficult question. Okay, yes, I think. When it comes to heuristic abilities, we need to distinguish two forms of heuristic abilities.
Heuristic abilities that are evolutionary embedded, basically are evolutionary determined, and social practices, again as a form of heuristics. But the thing is that I think if we carefully distinguish, and this is kind of, again, an open question, how much we can distinguish these two from one another. if we distinguish social heuristic capacities from evolutionary heuristic capacities, then we are capable of updating. Because social practices draw their power, practical power, from the diffusibility of norms of actioning,
which are a category of rational ends. Whereas... Evolutionary heuristics are precisely constrained by that natural mechanistic telus, by norms of functioning. so there is not this is exactly what for example we make civilization in this sense but making a civilization is not entirely based on our embodied heuristics but it's about practical social heuristics and there are positive traits that can be passed on they can be cultivated, they can be updated it.
Thank you. I mean, the thing is that... One of the things that we need to distinguish social heuristic practices from evolutionary heuristic practices is that social practices are massively defeasible. Thanks. Social heuristics are massively defeasible precisely because they are socially embedded. They are following implicit rules.
And once we, you know, because if historical consciousness is making explicitness of implicit commitments that we have taken in the past, Then by making explicit or implicit rule-following procedures that we basically commit ourselves to when we are practicing these social forms of intelligence, we have essentially a capacity to revise them. by understanding these practices as social experiments in producing hypotheses, basically, for how to move forward.
And this is exactly what abductive reasoning is, abductive inferences. And I think the social practices are basically forms of abductive procedure in the sense that you create hypotheses. And hypotheses are extremely useful because they not only create basically orientational cues, but also allow you to basically be capable of revising or abandoning, if necessary, utilities or instrumentalities that you have adapted in order to reach to these, for example, goals, to these hypothetical goals.
Or if, for example, a goal is being failed, then you adapt a new goal, a new hypothesis with, again, its own required dimension of instrumentalities. Whereas I think natural heuristics are essentially about, are basically elementary particles of the social heuristic practices. They are building blocks, but I don't know, this is again an open question, how much do they influence really in the broad pragmatic social constitution of practices? This is something that needs to be addressed in terms of the influence of evolutionary
biases channeled by embodied heuristic passes over social heuristic practices, which social heuristic practices being understood pragmatically. Jordan, do you have any... That's a very helpful distinction, actually. It gives me a lot to think about, chew on. Because I know that you are talking about heurism and... I was just going to say quickly, so, you know, abductive reasoning is surely heuristic to a sense as well, or to a degree as well. Would you say that, you know, the pathology of self-consciousness,
realizing its adequacy, and then determining its social relation or embeddedness, would you say that that is a deductive or potentially inductive stage of processing and that abductive reasoning implies that social or it can overcome that pathology, I guess? I said that probably it would be too optimistic to say that it can be overcome, but it can be mitigated. Okay, sure. And the most important thing is really I think it's the fundamental stoic thesis that agency
should not impede the realization of agency as a project with the understanding that only an understanding of agency as a project is what warrants the intelligibility of the agent or agency. And if basically we are impeding the project with also understanding again, again addition, addendum that the project has the capacity for self apprehension and that's basically what the evolution of social intelligence is once the project is capable of self-apprehending itself self realizing itself then if we do not
contribute to this project we create a kind of a two a bifuricated pathology at At one point, we are impeding what makes us intelligible to begin with and entitle us to things like freedom, this and that. But also, simply, we create a kind of impasse for our historical self-consciousness. because historical self-consciousness is essentially a form of basically a transcendental project. Reza, what would be the positive use of nihilism in the realization of agency,
something that would undo that impasse? I think that's hard. I mean, I really need to think about this, but I agree with Ray that, you know, that nihilism is an opportunity for cognitive inquiry, and I would really like to think it in terms of the stoic understanding of time, that if time, the reality of time is time as subsistence as such, not time as belonging. That is, time doesn't belong to the living. Adaptation, basically adaptation of intelligence to the reality of time, understood as the excess of destinations of the origin,
is really an adaptation, is a kind of a nihilist form of adaptation, that you recognize basically the purposeless of time and the ceaseless becoming of time, subsisting as such, as an opportunity of your transformation rather than as an impediment. in the sense that if we say that what makes nihilism nihilism is precisely that time does not belong to the living, does not belong to anyone, but also time is bereft of any goal whatsoever,
then precisely a spirit or intelligence adapts to the purposeless of this, you know, ionic dimension, that there is no goal, because the reality of time has not taken place. If we say that the reality of time has taken place, time is rendered, is basically re-inscribed in the living, becomes the chronic reading of time, time as belonging, as duration, as being in the order of living temporalities. But if we say that...
Sorry, go on. Does that mean like the destinations against the origin are outside of time? Or how do you conceive of that? Outside of the temporal time of the living, outside of the chronic reading of time, yes. And this is exactly what a spirit does. a spirit instead of transforming itself according to an origin, according to an end that is simply the reconciliation with the origin, it adapts, it basically constructs its principle
of construction or principle of transformation, historical self-consciousness according to to the absence, complete absence of such trace, of such goal. And that's what really rational ends is. Norms of actionings are not norms of functioning. With norms of functioning are the ones in which the mechanisms, the underlying mechanisms, already prescribe the goal of basically a functioning agency, a functional agency. How hard, the final causes basically, our final causes. If we see that mechanisms basically have the capacity to dictate what intelligence should do,
then ultimately intelligence simply becomes adaptation or transformation according to a goal that has already been prescribed in its originary mechanistic level. For example, we see it in a good example we talked about this. For example, a heart, norms of functioning is that what is the case with the heart? Heart pumps blood and then for a better heart we need to conceive a heart that pumps, for example, this amount of blood, maintains this amount of metabolism, so on. this and that. But norms of actioning are diverging from norms of functioning in the
sense that they establish a goal that is no longer determined by the mechanistic constitution, by that strongly structural functioning. It becomes basically reinvention of not a heart, but something else, if you want to address this. It becomes the question of transhumanism, basically. The transhumanism, once you really take it to its ultimate conclusions, is not the enhancement of human, but to engineer something completely different. almost a post-human agency. But there is one caveat here,
that the norms of actioning, even though they are prior for the rational agency, are prior to the norms of functioning, nevertheless they use norms of functioning in order to robustly basically move ahead. And that's exactly what instrumentalities are. You need to have basically address the material constraints constraints of your natural constitution in order to robustly establish a rational end and able to function according to rational end. But with the understanding that as the progression towards rational end is further augmented, As the autonomy of the agencies further augmented, this coupling of function and structure, history
of the agents and its natural constitution is increasingly weakened. Yes, okay. So nihilism, I think the most important dimension of nihilism in this scenario is that the spirit moves forward by weakening its teleogenic goals, by its natural goals. And that's really the constitution of historical self-consciousness, that it constitutes its rational ends. With rational ends, in fact, express the absence, the ultimate absence of any teleogenic goal.
hence an adaptation or mimicking of the reality of time as that which basically does not have any teleogenic goal. You had a question for me earlier about heuristics in my... Yes. ...froze up so I wasn't able to unmute myself. Can you repose that question? Yes, I was saying that, do you have any, in regard to Josh asked, because I know that you are interested in heuristics. That's okay, we say that heuristic practices at the rudimentary level, the embodied heuristics,
they are evolutionary determined and hence they yield a good amount of evolutionary biases and embodied biases. Now, when we have these biases, and these biases originate from this fact that our prior knowledge always plays a decisive role for how we generate knowledge through these heuristic practices. But that's exactly the dogmatic part of it. Now, if that's the case, then how can we update heuristics in the social domain? Is it even possible to update heuristics?
Oh, absolutely, but you have a couple problems there. The first thing is that there's no theory of causality with heuristics. It's all correlation. It's all, you know, there may or may not, I was talking with someone about the relationship of, you know, people's relationships to technology and how that's starting to resemble something closer to shamanism or rain making than the old mechanistic models of technology. because really when I'm working with a computer or something like that, there's so much going on, and I understand the broad sweep of it, but I don't understand every little thing. So you have general principles that you apply that are general rules, and they work well enough, and to the extent that they work, you use them.
To the extent that they stop working, you have that feedback mechanism. So what you have with evolutionary is you have an extremely long timeline where things that only work for very specific reasons or for very short periods and then have long periods of just not working tend to get worked out. Socially, you just have a tighter loop, and you haven't had as much chance to kind of find a semi-stable solution. But the thing is with a heuristic is there's so much assumptions baked into it, whether it's evolutionary or whether it's social, that if you change the context in which a heuristic is deployed,
then it may or may not obtain the results that you're desiring. And the example Josh gave, actually, of the dress is actually a really good example because... Yeah, that's the diffusibility of heuristics. They are massively diffusible, yes. Yeah, and so there you have people who, for some people, they were automatically mentally adjusting the picture that they were seeing based on perceived light conditions. Their brain said, well, this is the possible light conditions of this photo, so I'm going to adjust the colors that I actually took in through my senses, and what I'm actually seeing in my mind is not the raw sensory input, it's the amended sensory input. You're never seeing this straight transmission. So I don't see any inherent contradiction between them.
You're just operating with different scales. In neither case do you really have something that's making the strong claims that some people would like them to make. The biggest catch with heuristics is when you think you're measuring something, you might not be measuring what you think you're measuring. And a really good example of this is actually in computer science with neural networks. in some of the earliest research on neural networks you had the Department of Defense they were trying to use it to have they were trading computers on photographs of camouflage tanks they were basically trying to have a digital recognition that is a camouflage tank present in this surveillance photo or not
and they thought they landed on success because with the sample set of photos that they had they got to a point of 100% recognition rate. And the way neural networks work is it's like a genetic algorithm. So you as a human operator, you don't actually understand how the computer is making that determination. You just feed it the input, and it's a functionalist approach. You feed it the input, the computer makes an assessment, and then out of it you look at that and say, well, since I knew the answers to these inputs already, and since the answers that the computers are giving match my answers, then it seems to be working. But then they started testing it on new photos that were outside of the training set. And they were just getting all kinds of bizarre results.
And what it ultimately turned out to be was that there was a correlation that nobody had noticed with the training set where there were similar cloud conditions in all of the photos that had tanks. and what the computer was matching on was the cloud conditions and not the tanks. But when you're in a functionalist approach, as long as you happen to be in an environment where cloud conditions and tanks correlate strongly, you're never going to notice that your heuristic is actually optimizing for the wrong thing until your situation changes enough that you see a divergence. Yeah, okay. It's really, really interesting. I think my problem with the heuristic is that heuristics are good for making instrumentalities,
precisely because of their hypothetical, counterfactual capacities and the way that they can be rendered defeasible. But it looks to me that ontologization of heuristics as the primary method of knowledge generation and how to move forward in the scope of very historical transformation can create really collective biases in the sense that precisely I think this is good in the field of AI. It shows that the pathology of heuristic biases, in the sense that rather than we always try to emulate intelligence or question of what intelligence is and what intelligence can be,
simply by adapting embodied evolutionary heuristics and resorting to naturalistic mechanisms, basically. But this is exactly what intelligence cannot be, ultimately, as a fundamental question, that intelligence cannot, as such, as a project, cannot be a mechanistic entity, cannot be explained away in terms of mechanisms. because the whole point of intelligence is the transformation of its natural constitution. So if we are simply trying to simply putting the model of how we are making intelligence
by resorting to, you know, kind of mechanistic models, naturalistic models, we are basically creating a kind of already making a kind of metaphysical bias in terms of determining what intelligence is or what intelligence can be. And that creates, you know, a huge, basically different kinds of pathologies. All the stuff that, you know, artificial AI talk about, whether, you know, optimistic fatalism, that intelligence is, you know, inevitable because it's simply, you know, a spectrum of natural evolution or intelligence cannot be ever, you know, in that sense be established because, you know, you can't really,
there is a range of manipulation when it comes to natural mechanisms, so on and so forth. I think the failure modes amongst artificial intelligence researchers is actually the opposite. A lot of the work in AI for most of the history of the discipline was really focused around rational modes of thought, semantics, semiotics, systems of thought. Yes, but you see, they were, again, I mean, this is exactly what the logicians were. Go ahead. No, I was saying that precisely because they were trying to, again, to find a specific structure for intelligence.
A specific structure can be either natural or linguistic. But the whole point is that intelligence does not have a specific structure. Language was, for example, the whole logicians of the 30s, Turing, Herbrand, and all these people precisely were trying to anchor the problem of intelligence and metaphysics of intelligence in that particular structure without actually talking about this pragmatic context. And that's exactly why there is a huge setback in artificial intelligence in terms of semantic syntactic decomposability.
Well, that's where I think the two major steps forward that have happened in recent years is, A, recognizing that the lack of ends is actually a huge issue. and secondly, or the lack of a telos. And then secondly, the embodiment is actually a huge issue because if you divorce, if you have an intelligence in a box but it lacks an environment and it lacks any ends, you really have nothing. Yes, that's a functionally materially constrained function that you need to have, you understand multiple realizability of function only through its multiply constrained, materially constrained dimension of function.
That you can't abstract function from the material. I'm also going to dig up there was an interview with the head of the Facebook AI division that was actually really good, I'll dig that up here okay, good okay now Well, I think one question that can be posed here in terms of that intelligence adapts to the reality of time, and when I'm talking about intelligence, I specifically mean it
in terms of social intelligence. social intelligence being you know in a sense is exactly an intelligence capable of self apprehension they were constituting its own history or its own sequence of self transformations the question is can intelligence cognitive time can intelligence conceive time? I think this is an open question at the level of conceptual cognition. But insofar as intelligence primarily consists in constituting a history and a temporality shaped by active and determined negation of the
origin, namely the determination of natural constitution over history of transformation, its adaptation to time can no longer be seen as merely a mechanical or even autopoietic reaction to time, but a strongly functional adaptation. We talked about this different variation of adaptation to time in terms of, you know, a strongly structural, a structural functional coupling and a strongly functional. It's adaptation to time can no longer be seen as merely a mechanical or even autopoietic
reaction to time, but a strongly functional adaptation that passes through a distinct kind of self-consciousness, which is the historical self-consciousness. In this sense, self-realization according to time as that which subsists rather than belonging, intelligence conceives time, if not through conceptual cogitation, then by practical self-cultivation or self-apprehension as a practical project. So basically the history of intelligence in this Hegelian scenario is really a cogitation
of time through practical reasoning. Now what I want to talk about before this session ends, I would like to just briefly talk about exactly what kind of model of history are we talking about in when we are talking about you know the history of intelligence what kind of what is the relation between temporalities with understanding that as we talked about about last session that if a spirit, geist, or intelligence
ontologizes one temporality over another and is incapable of adapting to the reality of time, its historical self-consciousness becomes pathological and impoverished. We talked about this in terms of prioritization of pasts is the pathology of preservation or conservation. The pathology of the ontologization of present results in pathology of activism. And ontologization of future, or prioritization of future,
Okay. Okay. one of the main ideas that we talked about in the first session before I address this historical pathologies was that the idea of self-consciousness in
in terms of its functional decomposition to two activities self-conception and self-transformation, and that consciousness, basically the first constitutive gesture of consciousness is really the separation of appearances from reality. that allows for consciousness to be capable of recognizing, basically, its position in the world to act according to it, but also to this separation of reality from appearances,
distinguishing decantation process self-consciousness or mind or guys or spirit or intelligence is capable of determinedly negating its past self narratives and that's becomes the engine of self transformation for the guys for intelligence the thing is that when we look at it in a broader philosophical perspective this seems to be the primary concern of philosophy in fact this is where philosophy comes forth as the first discipline and that's a strives to
to drive a wedge between reality and appearances in order to unbind the freedom of the mind, or the freedom of self-consciousness, or the freedom of intelligence. I mean, from my personal perspective, in fact, we can, when we look into the history of philosophy, as we talked about both in the, you know, kind of the dimension of the theoretical, of theoretical reason or practical reason, whether it is the way to truth or the way to the good, Platonic or the Socratic, Confucian versus, you know, Stoic, is that we see that
Basically, the way that philosophy sets its preenial questions, it seems to be a project, once you really retroactively see this history as a whole, that the project of philosophy is, in fact, a project of constituting a science of the mind, or a science of intelligence. And the way that philosophy, in fact, functions can be understood, as I will try to argue before moving to this historical pathologies, can be understood as a simulation of the intelligence to come.
as basically a gesture toward it, really laying the groundwork, the speculative groundwork, for how to conceive this intelligence and how to augment it. So I'm going to read a little bit to make this philosophical gesture more palpable before saying that by constituting a history for itself philosophy, in fact, it gestures toward recognition of an intelligence that is capable of constituting its own history.
And in this sense, I mean, philosophy, and that was, you know, the whole, basically the underlying idea of this seminar, that philosophy needs to be understood as a speculative model of intelligence. I mean, intelligence from the broadest perspective is basically liberated by two waves. One is the scientific cognitive wave, which is basically the functional, materially constrained. We talked about the SELAR's idea of absolute knowing, that how it resulted in, you know,
kind of once you really deepen that cognitive scientific approach, you again kind of, you approach the landscape of absolute knowing, the regulative ideal of science. But also other than this wave, this scientific wave, there is a speculative wave that liberates intelligence. intelligence properly understood can never be can never be established its intelligibility its metaphysical intelligibility cannot be established without this speculity wave that is I for me it's basically philosophy is the
first discipline that gestures toward this speculative liberation of intelligence so one is a scientistic one that's addresses in terms of the empirical dimension of intelligence in terms of you know pure recognition and the other one is the speculative approach and that's really where the question of intelligence and the question of time basically coincide so as I said philosophy first gesture it's to disturb the apparent natural equilibrium
equilibrial balance between subjects and the world by doing so it brings about the possibility of differentiating reality from the world of appearances, thought from the thing. Now I want to, you know, before moving with our argument and discussion, I want to talk about how philosophy basically makes this speculative gesture that can be understood as a liberating wave for the functional evolution of intelligence. Effectuated by the epistemic polarization of the mind and the world, this differentiation is an initial step for a non-trivial and piecemeal synthesis between reality and appearances.
So philosophy's first, you know, basically moment, first act is to differentiate reality from appearances so as to incrementally, rather than to a myth of a given, bring them back together. it is important to note that this synthesis should not be misconstrued as restoration of the gap between reality of appearances to a state prior to perturbing the peace of the mind and the peace of the world. It is this agitation that marks the territory of knowledge and enables the synthetic activities of cognitive inquiry that are distinguished by the ever-growing demands of thought.
As such, the synthesis is fundamentally irreconcilable with the cognitive idleness of gnosis and its ready-made solutions for generating the knowledge of the real. Now, by driving a wedge between the mind and the world, understood as the ratio of epistemic separation, come ontological correspondence. philosophy forever departs from the domain of gnosis where the knowledge of the world is given in the subject of thought or experience philosophy makes this gesture in order to construct itself a history rather than having an essential nature played by direct knowledge of the given or the laws of
the divine however in fashioning its own escape from the clutches of theology and gnosis by injecting disequilibrium into the landscape of thought by disturbing the world of the given philosophy makes an important contribution to the history of thought whose consequences and ambitions far exceed the scope of philosophy and that's the speculative wave that basically needs to be understood as a liberation of intelligence by disturbing the equilibrium between the mind and the world and decanting reality from appearances philosophy turns in self into the single most consequential event in the history
of the mind, and as I will talk about with relation to intelligence and time, history of general intelligence. By providing a blueprint for the knowledge of the mind and calling attention to pitfalls of knowledge that precipitates the maladies of the mind. In short, philosophy develops a necessary link between the mind and knowledge, correlating the augmentation of the former with the production of the latter. And this is, when I'm talking about this knowledge, I specifically mean it in terms of historical knowledge. Through this link, the functional evolution of the mind contributes to the expansion of historical knowledge
and the proliferation of knowledge, or historical knowledge, or historical consciousness, contributes to the realization of the mind as a self-apprehending history. In the same vein, philosophy reveals the interconnection between the pitfalls of knowledge and maladies of the mind. But insofar as both knowledge and the mind are social projects, the reinforcing effects between the pitfalls of the former and maladies of the latter first register themselves in the social domain, particularly the social's recognition of history. since it is only the mind at the level of the social that is able to recognize
history by activating the reciprocal recognition the retrospective appropriation of the past and the prospective integration toward the future now following the maxim there is no cognition without recognition we can say that the impairment of the recognition of history precipitates a pervasive social disability the social becomes unable to explore history that is it becomes unable to recollect the past while positively orienting toward the future once the knowledge of history is compromised and the knowledge of history is simply you know that creating adequate links between
temporalities rather than ontologizing or prioritization of one temporality over another once the knowledge of history is compromised the ability of the social with regard to what to think and what to do is radically incapacitated the consequences of this incapacitation register not only in the socio-political field but also in the organization of various modes of thoughts and social practices. Only once we have diagnosed the pitfalls of knowledge, whether it is knowledge of understanding and action or the knowledge of the mind or history, it is possible to develop antidotes for the maladies of the mind, namely impoverishment or impediment
of intelligence. Likewise, the reinforcing loop between the augmentation of the mind or intelligence, and the expansion of frontiers of knowledge creates an exploratory account of history through which social intelligence begins its epoch, an epoch for which our age is only, as I said, prehistory. Now, how philosophy makes this a speculative liberation is that the separation of reality from appearances, the disturbance of the equilibrium between the mind and the world has its first impacts on the central concerns of philosophy, namely truth and goodness. If knowledge of the world
is no longer directly or immediately given in the mind, then it means that truth truths are not a priori available to us either. The same can be said about goodness, and that's what we talked about in terms of the question of agency. The question of agency becomes intelligible once it abundons the myth of the given, both in the direction of the truth and in the direction of good. And then that road to the truth and good for the agency becomes a matter of constituting and constructing a project. We no longer enjoy an immediate access to the highest good, and therefore goodness becomes a matter
of piecewise construction. In other words, the discarding of the given, both at the level of truth and goodness, theoretical reason and practical reason, occasions and all-encompassing emancipation. On the one hand, it brings about the possibility of access to explanatory layers and new descriptive resources. We talked about it in the first module. Thus fostering and amplifying understanding to simultaneously broadening and fine-graining explanation. On the other hand, however, this rejection of the given at the level of goodness and practical reason gives rise to new opportunities of practice and consequently unlocks what after Foucault can be called technologies of the self and the other, namely constructible ethical and political practices.
Therefore, rather than becoming an impediment and a source of crisis, the alienation from the comforting abode of the given truth and the original good namely a good whose method of attainment has already prescribed in an origin, whether it is divine or natural or basically chronic. The alienation from comforting a both of the given truth and the original good becomes a condition of enablement. This is the very meaning of philosophy as a discipline that continuously works under the condition of an enabling alienation.
And as I will talk about, it's a speculative wave that liberates intelligence from beyond is really this enabling, this augmentation of alienation. This alienation brings two highly asymmetrical terms, such as reality and appearances, understanding and nature, causal reducibility and logical irreducibility, epistemological separation and ontological correspondence, under one single schema, producing a fragile or perturbable equilibrium necessary for perpetually reorienting thought, revising the world.
and if necessary, dismantling the world of appearances and accumulated knowledge and building it anew. Now, driven by emancipative alienation, philosophy operates as the combined force of wisdoms, theoretical and practical, whose duty is to approach truth and goodness in a gradual fashion. This gradual and open-ended approach to truth and goodness is the beginning of the game of navigation. But this approach becomes a game solely in the sense that it conforms to rule-based practices that are error tolerant, namely defeasible, and open to collective manipulation, which is to say social revision and construction.
And just to give you a heads up where I'm going with all this is that I want to argue that philosophy understands history as navigation of time and what it means to be able to navigate time through self, through constituting a history. Within the game of navigation, truth is no longer treated as canonical. Instead, it is approached as making sense of what it means to take something as true and what it means to make it true, separately and in relation to one another. The approach to goodness, on the other hand,
So, yes, I said, on the other hand, however, this rejection of the given at the level of goodness and practical reason gives rise to new opportunities of practice and consequently unlocks... Oh, no, that wasn't what I was reading. Sorry. I completely... Okay, yes. Okay, yes. I found it. Driven by this emancipative alienation, philosophy operates as the combined forces of wisdom, theoretical and practical, whose duty to approach truth and goodness in a gradual fashion. Now, I said that the approach to goodness is realized as expanding the scope of navigation
of what it means to take something as true and what it means to make it true. That is to say, goodness is understood as the maintaining and enhancement of freedom of understanding and action. And we talked about this, that the intelligibility of agencies, is ultimately the positive, the aggregate of negative and positive freedom of the agency, the maximization of both. And that's what really renders agents intelligible and entitles it to any other thing. That is to say, goodness is understood as the maintaining and enhancement of freedom of understanding and action. different options future opportunities alternative paths possibilities of
reinforcement and reintegration once a wedge is driven between the mind and the world so that a horizon of navigation occasioned by dispensing with the given is opened up truth and goodness are no longer immediately granted to the subjects the possibility of knowledge is the effect of planting this point of this equilibrium between the mind and the world and the perpetual agitation thought resulting from this disturbance you guys can hear me right right yes yes perfect okay without this estate of agitation there is no possibility of qualitative organization of information out of the homogeneous
information space even the fact that the qualitative organization of information is necessary for conception and knowledge production it is the introduction of the point of this equilibrium between the mind and the world as a primary gesture of philosophy is that as you shot let notes opens a horizon in the landscape of thought highlighting transits and ramifying paths between appearances and reality the subject and the world otherwise impossible to recognize from the perspective of an unperturbed landscape. Now, the horizon, Schatler says, opens a field, a continuum of degrees between the illusion
of a transparent reading and what looks as if it will never be within reach because it maintains all these reaches. In short, the horizon is a train of knowledge that systematically converts all degrees and choices of disequilibrium generated by the tension between appearances and reality, the mind and the world, into opportunities of navigation. These ramifying paths or transits transform the train of knowledge into a multipathic structure where the principle of uniqueness of path is dissolved. And what is really important for the evolution, the speculative, functional evolution of intelligence,
that speculative liberation is the abolishment of this principle of unique past when it comes to knowledge of history, as I will talk about. the multipathic structure is necessarily an oblique one that rejects the direct access to reality and because of its discursive configuration is deeply entangled with time discursive reasoning takes time and that's what distinguishes it from the myth of the given in so far discursive reasoning takes time, as I will argue, it has the opportunity also to adapt to the reality
of time. Knowing becomes a matter of qualitatively organizing a homogeneous informational landscape by moving from one path to another, investigating transit and obstructions by taking determinate stances or orientations, by arriving at new fields of decision-making and judgment, by inferentially articulating concept spaces and navigating different pathways. Uniqueness of path or unipathicity, as I will talk about it, is a disabling condition for knowledge in the broadest possible sense and must be actively forestalled and
this is what intelligence ultimately should be as basically for stalling this disabling condition from this point onward since truth and goodness are not wholly within our reach they must be approached to a gradual navigation comprised of cognitive and social based practices in other words practices required to approve approach truth categorized under theoretical reason and practices necessary in the pursuit of goodness of practical reasoning since for philosophy the mind is distinguished by its activities with regard to truth and goodness thinking and doing then engaging in the game of navigation
counts as a re-enacting the mind itself a practical simulation if not the very reconstruction of it in other words if the mind does if what the mind does is what the mind is and if for philosophy the activity of the mind or a spirit or intelligence are characterized as its capacities to approach truth and goodness through engaging in rule-based practices, then the game of navigation is the functional realization of the mind outside of its familiar natural habitat, or the order of is, what is the case. In Heideggerian terms, a special performances of the mind can be treated as in witches,
das wubaya, or performances in which the mind is whatever it is or would be. Correspondingly, any class of in which can be fulfilled by its modifiable by and toward witches, das womit and das wuzu, or simply the role it plays and the orientations it assumes in a functional organization. Within this ingenuous formulation, this is a kind of historical functionalist understanding of a spirit, mind, self-consciousness as philosophy constitutes. Within this ingenuous
formulation lies the nucleus of philosophy's pragmatist functionalist approach to the mind highlighted by the likes of Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Espinosa, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Zonks and Sellers and Brando. If the mind is the functional organization of a specific set of activities which are social in so far as they expand complex organizations of both intrapersonal and interpersonal domains, we can understand the mind as a set of practices whose performances and elaboration count as the realization of these activities and thereby the realization of the meaning of the mind. In other words, what should we do and what should we think in order to count as realizing the mind
or those activities which define it? And this what to think and what to do, we talked about, are the pre-neal questions of philosophy. And we see that the project of philosophy, by answering, trying to answer these questions, is in fact trying to address the question of how to establish a history of the mind or a history of intelligence that is capable of self-realizing itself, apprehending itself, namely automating those practices that define its activities, that give its meaning. But since both thinking and doing, in the sense of purposive action,
are decomposable to different sets of theory and practice-oriented practices, we can condense the previous question to what should we do in order to count as doing what the mind does, or what intelligence does. This question is a basis for understanding intelligence or mind in terms of its practical decomposability into a set of practices or doings. Conducting these practices under the constraints of modes of organization implicit to them count as understanding the meaning of the mind but also constructing it.
So, in order for philosophy, in trying to speculatively decipher the meaning of the mind, philosophy gestures, speculative gestures to making a blueprint for the construction of intelligence. therefore the pragmatic functionalist understanding of the mind itself a fruit of disturbing the equilibrium of the informational homogeneity between thought and thing is a historical moment in the evolution of intelligence or historical self consciousness
but evolution in what sense in the sense that the pragmatic functionalist realization of the mind the understanding of its meaning meaning through use or practices, coincides with the artificial realization of the mind, or the construction of its space, the unity of use, function, and meaning, by entirely different sets of realizers. For philosophy, the unity of both, that is the understanding of the meaning of the mind, and its artificial realization forms the project of self-realization through which mind constitutes its own history and evolves in accordance with it.
The history of the mind is a history that must liberate its own demands and purposes while at the same time take into consideration its natural history and respond to the constraints associated with its embodiment and material organization. The artificial, which is to say the mind realized by the artifactual, reintegrates into the reality of the mind as that which has no foundational nature or no origin, but only histories and possibilities of multiple realization. Its meaning cannot be traced back to an original foundation or an inherent nature because it is constituted by practices which determine it
and are themselves susceptible to social modification, to basically manipulation and revision. Understanding the mind at the juncture between reality and appearances accordingly is tantalizing to constructing it. The introspection of the mind into the condition of its possibility, why is the mind possible at all, and that's what philosophy tries to speculatively address, is a register of an emancipative alienation and is the first spark for envisioning the mind outside of its natural or native habitat. The gesture of treating the possibility of the mind as a question and a subject of scrutiny, rather than as a given, as bound to the order of origin, is charged with an impulse to think and realize the mind through the artificial.
This is because examining the possibility of the mind represents a pivotal moment. It creates a discontinuity and an externalization that allows questioning the possibility of the mind as a possibility whose realization depends on the fulfillment of certain condition and the presence of certain sets of organization of realizers. This ultimately leads to a non-inefable conception of the mind as a possibility that can be fulfilled by different decidrata than those which already constitute it. Now, a mind that is possible and whose possibility is also open to question or scrutiny is a mind that is conditioned by a certain functional component and organization.
and organizations. This is nothing but a prototypical picture of the mind as an artificial edifice. Here, the concept of the artificial does not stand against the natural as something man-made. Artificiality does not imply a breach of natural laws. Instead, the artificial suggests a propensity to adapt to new regime of purposes that can be identified following cellars by their causal reducibility combined with their logical irreducibility. It is the reducibility that does not posit the artificial outside of nature, and it is the irreducibility that engenders a new regime of rules
and ends whose effects resonates with what Kant calls autonomy. And that's, this logical irreducibility is what I'm going to talk about, is basically that speculative wave of historical consciousness that ultimately liberates intelligence. Disassembling the possibility of the mind in terms of its givenness and reassembling it in functional terms signals the possibility of realizing the mind outside of the image of what it was supposed to be. as bound to an origin or ultimate foundation or goal, outside of where it was supposed to be embedded
and divergent from the destination it was supposed to aim at. As the disequilibrium between the mind and the world seeds the game of navigation, the possibilities of realization of the mind and understanding it begin to change and expand according to the scope and the complexity of navigation. The understanding of the mind can be enriched by new practices whose elaboration counts as realizing the meaning of the mind. In the same way, the mind can be functionally realized and augmented in broader contexts by different sets of realizing practices or social practices.
In the context of philosophy's approach to truth and goodness, the evolution of the mind in the sense of its multiple and multimodal realizability can be expanded and enhanced by expanding and enhancing its navigational approaches to truth and goodness. And this navigational approach to truth and goodness is simply that robust knowledge of history, understanding history not as a linear progression or linear reflection but a medium of exploration. If philosophy's model of the mind is distinguished by its practical abilities to approach truth and goodness,
then the diversification of the space of navigation, by diversifying and upgrading the armamentarium or toolboxes of epistemic and sociopolitical practices, is the first step in expanding the evolution of the mind in the above sense. Without this diversification and upgrading of practices implicit to truth and goodness or theoretical and practical reasoning, the meaning of the mind remains more or less fixed and its evolution limited. But why does the determination of the meaning of the mind in terms of the practices that constitute its activities imply an expanded evolution of the mind?
Or to rephrase the question, why does the understanding and realization of the mind in terms of its practical rather than formalist algorithmic decomposability not only limit, not only not limit the evolution of the mind, but also broaden the scope of its evolution? Or how does defining the mind as a practical project rather than ideal object become the most consequential event in the history of the mind? Because practices whose elaboration counts as fulfilling the activities of the mind can be collectively modified or upgraded. They are distinguished by their social manipulability and by their capacity to bootstrap complex abilities out of primitive ones.
This is what sets apart philosophy's thesis regarding practical decomposability of the mind, understanding of intelligence as a project rather than an ideal object that can be traced back to a specific structure. it sets this apart from the picture of the mind understood under the heading of algorithmic logical decomposability of the mind, as, for example, espoused by the symbolic AI for which thought parcels are ideological objects and hence open to identical algorithmic iterations.
And that's, again, in response to what Jordan was talking about, that this is the idea that the speculative wave that philosophy initiates for the liberation of intelligence effectively understands intelligence as a practical project rather than an ideal object. An ideal object, you can't trace it to a specific structure. But if we see that the metaphysics of intelligence is constituted in its practical decomposability, its instantiation as a practical project, you no longer are capable of conceiving it as an ideal object
and also tracing back to models that are tethered to a specific structure, whether it's a logical structure or a natural mechanistic structure. While identical iterations as associated with, for example, market algorithms relapse back into the unremarkably prevalent domain of pattern-governed processes, rule-based practices, which undergird theoretical practical reasoning, especially practical reasoning, even though they are at base pattern governed, are able to proliferate and adapt to purposes that are not given in their underlying patterns. And that's what makes norms of action divergent from norms of functioning.
This is how the mind as a practical object is able to leap further in a manner that is neither deductive exhaustion based on the general schema of its current characteristics nor induction from its common features with the natural history of the cognitive mind. the characterization of the mind as a practical object or practical project the characterization of the mind as a practical object rather than an ideal one essentially amounts to the identification of the mind as a practical project because the domain of practices is integratively social
whether these practices are associated with forming and articulating concepts or are linked to purposive action. The domain of practices possesses a commitment-laden dimension. It is open to social construction, revision, and is capable of organizing collective configurations by individuating special practices. Now, in orienting the mind toward truth and goodness, philosophy, even though this gesture from superficial, might look trivial. Philosophy nevertheless forces the mind to enter the game of navigation and develop distinct game bias
or the attitude of being true to the game, following rules and constructing and updating them. This is but the rational compulsion necessary to navigate the space of commitments to truth and goodness through conforming to error-tolerant and revisionary rules of theoretical and practical reasoning. While the navigation space of epistemic practices is the space of knowledge, for sociopolitical practices, the navigation space is that of ethics and politics. Now, it is the integration of epistemic and sociopolitical practices that is the key to the evolution of intelligence as a practical project,
rather than a theoretical or a logical object. If for philosophy the functional account of intelligence is grasped in terms of its practical decomposability into both truth-oriented and goodness-oriented practices, then the realization of intelligence becomes a matter of unifying theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning, epistemic practices and social practices. However, this integration is impossible without having a rule-following behavior as a form of rational compulsion. There is no conceptual procedure and no determinative commitment to conceptual content as the requirement for action, namely that link between conception and transformation, without an inferential account of reason.
Any account of navigation requires inferences. Short of an inferentialist account of reason, commitment to the concept, or commitment in general, whether as a, is fundamentally important. It is not a commitment at all, lacking the rational compulsion or compliance compliance to the space of rules that we ourselves have made binding neither this neither the space of the concept nor the space of socio-political collectivity can be navigated it is in this sense that the game of navigation is first of all what Robert Brandon describes as a rational system of
commitments any orientation a stance or move in the game of navigation counts as a commitment in so far as the game of navigation consists of two theoretical and practical dimensions commitments fall under two general categories of theoretical and practical commitments to make a commitment is to endorse its content but to endorse the content of a theoretical or practical commitment be assertional, referential, inferential, cognitive or practical is to unpack or practically elaborate that content. In order to elaborate the content of a commitment, one must examine what other commitments it leads to, what else, what other collateral commitments and entitlements are its ramifications.
That's the game of navigation properly understood. Now taking the ramified paths of commitments and depriving oneself of incompatible commitments by updating, revising, or if necessary, abandoning commitments make up the rational compulsion that characterizes the system of commitments as a navigational system. To rationally respond to the force of one's commitment is to uproot oneself according to demands of its ramifying paths or revisionary outcomes. And this was the stoic thesis of agency. That's to commit to the agency is to commit to the very force of agency
as a project that deracinates the agent, that uproots the agent. Sorry. By turning the game of navigation into a system of commitments, philosophy gauges any choice of disequilibrium, whether in the realm of thought or action, by treating it as a commitment that must be taken to its far-reaching conclusions. So basically philosophy sees intelligence in terms of alternatives or choices of disequilibrium, choices of uprooting.
And alternatives need to be understood as commitments. And in order for you to be able to examine alternatives, in order for you to be able to establish the intelligibility of agency to these alternatives, freedom of investigating alternatives, you need to examine their ramifications. And this is, as I will talk about, is the model of exploratory model of history as the speculative wave that unbinds intelligence from its upper bounds, namely its tethering to teleogenic
goals. This philosophy sees any cognitive or practical commitment from the perspective of its collateral commitments and entitlements, it locates any navigational address or commitmental position one has endorsed in the past or is endorsing in the present from the perspective of its ramifying paths or future destinations. accordingly to take a stance to be prepared to revise the current position and the past itinerary by navigating ramifying paths which express the meaning of taking that stance. These are the transit and obstructions which express the possibility of a commitment or lack
thereof. A strong version of the game of navigation, accordingly, should be able to elaborate the permissibility dimension of transits and obstructions through deontic notions of permission and obligation. As a discipline that closely follows the procedure of practical and cognitive commitment-making as a form of navigation, philosophy constructs a mind in which rational This rational compulsion supplants natural impulsion. Under this rational compulsion, the compulsion to navigate, the mind gains the propensity to revise its abilities, thereby also revising what it is and how it can be realized.
Philosophy accordingly defines the meaning of the mind in terms of its activities in making and tracking commitments. but under the its initial acknowledgement and demand new abilities and activities in order for them to be further elaborated or navigated. Therefore, the mind that philosophy envisions is a mind that self-constitutes its history. This is the beginning of the model of historical self-consciousness or intelligence understood as a project for the elaboration of historical self-consciousness.
As that which realizes itself, not in virtue of where it has come from or what it currently is, but in spite of them. In other words, this is the expression of the mind as that which has a self-constituting history namely the ability to realize and define itself through what currently does not constitute it realizing itself through the artificial by swapping its natural constitution or biological organization with other forms of organization as as i will argue social organization is a central aspect of the mind being artificial or more precisely expressing itself via the artifactuality is the very meaning of the mind as that which has a history rather than essential nature.
So the artificiality of the mind that philosophy tries to talk about is not the artificiality that symbolic AI or AI in general tries to talk about. It's really the metaphysical meaning of artificiality as basically constituting a history that maximizes the freedom of intelligence. And this freedom of intelligence reflects in mitigation of teleogenic goals, in the overcoming of teleogenic goals. It's, in fact, an artificiality in this sense is the speculative wave unleashed by the autonomy of mind in constituting a history for itself.
to have a history is to have the possibility of being artificial that is to say expressing yourself not by way of what is naturally given to you but by way of what you yourself can make and organize denouncing this history is the same as rejecting freedom in all its forms denying the artificial truth of the mind in this speculative sense and refusing to this truth to its ultimate conclusions is to antagonize the history of the mind and therefore to be an enemy of thought. Because exactly that discursive, retroactive discursive line of reasoning that if we impede the freedom of agency as a project,
we are basically antagonizing the intelligibility of our agency. by reinventing the history of the mind as a system of navigation that is continuously being updated under the weight of its ramifying paths philosophy presents a model of the mind that is at once exploratory and revisionary the designated introduction of instability to the equilibrium balance of the mind and the world is the constitutive gesture of knowledge as a system that distinguishes reality from appearances and decants knowing from the obvious or any account of the given.
Because hidden under such disguises as the foundation, what appears to be the case, teleogenic functioning, or generally under the heading of what we already know, knowledge as being embedded in the origin, or basically the goal being prescribed by the origin, by the past, by what is given to us somehow. Or if it is not given to us, then we have to reconcile with it. Because even under such disguise as foundation, or generally under the heading of what we already know, the obvious or the given poses itself as the most disabling condition
for the production of knowledge and the paradigm of navigation. So just as there is a category of given for the epistemic, for the semantic dimension, for the dimension of the good, but there is also a given, a negative category of the given in knowledge of history, the historical given, that intelligence needs to basically overcome, needs to dispense with. And this is what really intelligence that recognizes its history as a medium of exploration of time is capable of doing. Now, because the myth of the given...
Now, the separation of reality from the world of appearance is not a sufficient condition for the realization of the mind as a project, nor is it adequate for the liberation of philosophy from the domain of theology and gnosis. Because the myth of the given and the insidious presence of the obvious under disguises of what we already know can appear even in the absence of any theology or gnosis. Now, in order to eradicate the more harmful residues of the epistemic given concealed in the system of navigation or the structure of knowledge, Itself, philosophy basically adapts a form of escepticism, a deep form of escepticism, and that's the escepticism of time bias, the escepticism of origin.
philosophy generally needs to be understood as a discipline that refuses to put any matter to rest I mean, it should distinguish by its absolute recalcitrance to basically conclude anything for its history. and the absolute recalcitrance this absolute recalcitrance bespeaks the corrosive
basically substance that runs through the body of philosophy which is that of the principle of deep skepticism as basically the most fundamental philosophical gesture, the speculative gesture of philosophy that liberates intelligence ultimately what is exactly this skepticism. In a simple way, this deep skepticism is that knowledge must be suspicious of what it already knows. To know more is to believe less. The more we know, the less should we believe in what we know. If the task of belief is to turn the accumulated knowledge into a regulative foundation and respectively a matter of truth, then the progress of knowledge is by definition
retroactively aborted. For how can we acquire new knowledge if the knowledge that has already been accumulated is treated as the locus of truth? Now, if the sight of truth is what has already taken place, then knowledge only exhibits truth preservation of classical, coological rationality, and thus violates the first objective of knowledge, which is that one knows because one does not know. But to know is to preserve and mitigate ignorance at the same time, a dual task whose logical structure is at odds with the monotonicity of truth preservation embedded in classical logic.
Now, the monotonic entailment of truth preservation function precisely by conserving ignorance in its very logic. It ignores the possibility of what it is ignorant of. This is the principle of conservation of ignorance without acknowledging it, or what can be called deficit of ignorance awareness. Now the principle of conservation without acknowledgement is a functional model of an epistemically maimed mind. It is a mind that empowers itself by choosing to operate on the basis of accumulated and well-stabilized information and in so doing, turning what it knows
into blind spots against what it doesn't. In such a scenario, further generation of knowledge equals further degeneration of the mind. and it's epistemic incapacitation. The pitfalls of knowledge become the maladies of the mind, and the maladies of the mind become social disabilities in knowing what to think and what to do. Now, from a navigational perspective, any account of truth that is situated in the past and reinforces the dogma of knowing more equals trusting more in the truth of what we know suffers from a unipathic structure or navigational uniqueness.
It is unipathic since in order to preserve truth, it must maximally stabilize the transit of truth values by ignoring any other possible path that might invalidate the preserved truth. Hence, the mapping and approaching truth is determined in advance. But the game of navigation, properly understood as the model of, speculative model of intelligence, endorses no unique path and no map drawn in advance. Not only is it multipathic, but it also does not leave unchanged any address or path taken in the past itinerary. We talked about in the last session that when intelligence acts on the present, it can always say the past is never what it used to be, precisely because of that order of non-bijective transformation.
That it never leaves the itinerary from the past to the present unchanged. In fact, the principle of constituting history is that means that you can never come back to that specific past from which you have basically transformed yourself. Its ramifying structure not only includes what ought to be navigated, the consequent content of the commitment, but also encompasses what has already been navigated, namely the antecedent commitments or the premises of the commitment as such. In other words, in the game of navigation, ramification is universal, all-encompassing. It is the universality that keeps knowledge in a permanent stage of agitation, a landscape
with a shifting scenery or a transitory ontology upon which no immutable foundation or navigational preconception can be imposed. Now whereas the unipathicity of truth preservation is secured by ignoring possible or hypothetical navigational paths or transit, the principle of deep skepticism is equipped with a tentative rationalism required for deviating from the unipathic navigational approach so as to be able to activate and acknowledge the condition of ignorance and respectively mitigate it. Now this is the underlying logic of non-monotonic reasoning, which of course intelligence integrates it in its knowledge of historical consciousness, in which ramification of every qualitatively
organized site of information into cascading paths creates a universal revisionary wave that perpetually reassess and alters any conclusion or information organized. Knowledge then becomes not about centralizing the accumulated known, whether it is a historical past or simply the acquired knowledge but about qualitatively organizing the information, navigating the space of these basically ramifying paths, developing supple and revisable conceptual paths and patchworks and accessing through various modes the existing knowledge bases
without regarding them as immutable foundations. Now, for knowledge, and this is what basically ultimately part of the adequate self-consciousness, historical self-consciousness of intelligence is, crisis of foundation needs to be understood as an emancipative prospect. According to the monotonic structure of unipaticity, which works from the viewpoint of epistemic entrenchment, the increase in the qualitatively organized information in the form of premises or axioms results in the increase in theorems, namely further establishment of the known.
But the non-monotonic structure of navigation as a ramifying procedure does not permit such a symmetry between to know and the known. This is but the navigational reformulation reformulation of deep escepticism in which to know does not necessarily make any positive difference in the known quant accumulated knowledge. Under the condition of non-monotonicity addition of new premises fundamentally revise the old conclusions and does not bolster the epistemic entrenchment. Now deep escepticism accordingly is the sharpening of the diffusibility inherent in the non-monotonicity of the realm of the mind itself.
It suggests that all insights of the mind into the inner workings of the world must be deflected or rendered defeasible by the insights of the mind into its own inner workings. Sorry. It suggests that all insights of the mind into the inner workings of the world must be deflected or rendered defeasible by the insights of the mind into its inner workings. It also simultaneously proposes that all insights of the mind into its inner workings must be deflected by the insights into the workings of the world, which condition the workings of the mind.
And that goes like that going back and forth between self-transformation and self-conception. You know, the intelligibility of self as a social function and the intelligibility of absolute processes that undergird such performances, such social practices. To put it differently, deeper skepticism builds orientational passages between workings of the mind and workings of the world. Now, I want to conclude this session, come to this, I know that we are kind of running short on time.
say that according to the skeptical current of philosophy it is the truth of acquired knowledge that occasions the blind spot against the truth of the future knowledge the unipathic approach to truth establishes a model of mind or intelligence as a reinforcing vicious circle blind to the progressive impoverishment of its own capacities. In reality, the more it knows, the less it knows because the more of the new is nothing but more of the same. Once the old or obtained knowledge is established as a regulative foundation, a matter of belief or basically a historical pivot,
all it produces is more of the same. It only reproduces itself qua foundation. Now, it is the parochial loop of the more we know, the more should we trust in what we know that fuels basically this skeptical gesture of philosophy. Now, in order to inhabit, in order to, sorry, in order to forbid the conversion or inhibit the conversion of knowledge into belief, and more importantly, in order to prevent the entrenchment of unipathicity, philosophy adapts two interconnected strategies to which basically this speculative wave of intelligence can be understood. Beneath the surface character of these strategies lies a different mode of adaptation to the reality of time as the truth of philosophy.
Strategy one is constructing a navigational or ramifying account of history. Rather than assuming that truth is in the past, the obtained knowledge of what has already taken place, the origin, philosophy dislodges the site of truth from the past to origin and what has already taken place to the future. If truth is characterized by its spatiotemporal side in the game of navigation, then to identify truth with what has already taken place or the past is both a metaphysical bias against the reality of time and a logical dogma against the site of truth. As I argued, the consequences of this logical dogma is the epistemic maiming of the mind.
By permanently moving the sight of truth to the future, where there is no accumulation of empirical footprint, hence unshackling truth from empirical dogmatism, in a sense, in order to determine the freedom or the functional evolution of intelligence, and two from which the reality of time is expressed as the asymmetry and excess of destinations over the origin or what has already taken place, philosophy introduces a new outlook on moving through history, the speculative unbinding of intelligence, moving from the past to the future, either as a result of privileging what has already taken place, origin over destinations, a deeper foundation over a broader evolution,
or as a result of proceeding from the historical truth situated in the past is the very condition of the unipathic structure and the monotonic logic of knowledge accumulation and moving according to this historical knowledge. By endorsing the bias that we must proceed from the site of accumulated information and under the general condition of preserving the invariant traits of this spatial, temporal, causal, or epistemic accumulation, unipathicity and monotonicity turn the conventional model of history as the path from the past toward the present toward the future into a disabling condition for the evolution of the mind
in the broadest possible sense. To think along this path is to integrate the principle of conservation of ignorance without acknowledgement, the ignorance deficit, within the very logic of socio-historical development as a different realization of mind. Over-emphasis on the epistemic entrenchment of what we already know, or the knowledge of what has already taken place, leads to the epistemic maiming that not only forestalls the future knowledge, but also distorts the recognition of history, both as a recollection of the past and orientation toward the future. So it's basically those people who always say that we need to gain our historical self-consciousness
by simply reflecting into the past conditions, precisely disabling themselves from coherently seeing, you know, coherently exercising this recognition or recollection of the past, precisely by abiding to the model of unipathic model of history that is epistemologically understood is a model of epistemic maiming and also a social disability in the broadest possible way. The blindness of the mind toward its own progressive incapacitation is re-inscribed at the level of historical processes where the historical development is increasingly drained
of its possibilities of action and understanding. Thinking on history, meaning recognition of history as recollection of the past and orientation toward the future or historical self-consciousness, in this sense becomes tantamount to the maiming of the mind, insofar as the two are tightly integrated via a network of general and specific practices. The unipathicity and monotonicity inherent in an account of history and historical truth realized as the path from the past or the origin toward the future preclude the very possibility of understanding and acting on history as a navigational train. And if the navigational structure is the condition of freedom, namely those alternatives,
transformation according to alternatives or generic trajectories of time that maximize the cultivation of the project of agency, then the unipathic account of history has only very limited resources for a genuine freedom. If the mind in the broadest possible sense evolves not only through but also in response to history, which conditions and nourishes it, then without a navigational or exploratory account of history, the evolution of the mind is by default restricted. An impoverished concept of history leads to an impoverished, epistemically maimed, and evolutionary limited mind.
I mean, the adverse or the dire sociopolitical implications of this correlation are, of course, yet to be adequately diagnosed, particularly because the mind, by virtue of its practical decomposability, not only encompasses the cognitive mind, but also mind as an intersubjective social community of basically norm consumers and norm producers. By establishing, you know, principle of deep skepticism against the temporal site of truth and the unipatic monotonic account of history, philosophy points to a navigational account of history.
According to this navigational account, the revisionary import of the future situated truths become a basis for the cultivation of the tendencies of the past, with the present being the site where the effects of revision and cultivation become manifest. only politics informed by this exploratory or navigational account of history is capable of unbinding the prospect of basically the mind in the broadest possible sense and thereby unlocking the hidden abilities of the mind as a socio-historical and practice based project lacking a navigational concept of history to think in terms of historical development is to further widen the deficit
of ignorance awareness at the level of history. It is the gaping deficit that manifests as descriptive and explanatory impoverishment with regard to historical processes. The immediate expression of this descriptive explanatory impoverishment is a prescriptive inconsequentiality concerning how we can possibly and recall how can we possibly recognize an act on history all we can hope for is either feeble resignation in favor of the ordinary pools the poor man's glass and height or take a capitalist deficit if not simply trifling in trifling XR exercises in localist solution
It is under this impoverishing model of history that Marxism today has attributes of a fear-mongering cult. And they feel more at home in identifying themselves with being the forces of the past rather than being the forces of the future. In order to reopen Marxism to the future without eliciting a pathological eschatology, it is necessary to have a navigational and a commitment-oriented model of history, not only to broaden the scope of action and understanding, but also to explore various ramifications of the reciprocal influence between history and the evolution of the mind as a social project in the broadest possible sense.
Now, this becomes ultimately what an Aestroik would tell you, that what the knowing subject should be afraid of is what it already knows, not what it doesn't. In the same fashion, what the collective subject should be wary of is the knowledge of history as the knowledge of the past and action solely in accordance with this knowledge. because whether it manifests as an implicitly or explicitly temporal register, the background knowledge is susceptible to being a locus of epistemic disablement because it is an epistemic entrenchment, establishment of a unipathic, truth-preserving trajectory.
Just as knowledge is a mode of navigation, history at its base is the exploration of time. Navigation or exploratory procedures are only possible in multipathic environments. For this reason, they are incompatible with unipathicity, be it a unipathic horizon of knowledge or unipathic account of history for which the historical link is always extended from the past quo origin. This is because the prospects of action and understanding in unipathic environments environments are limited to options that are strongly in conformity with accumulated resources of knowledge in so far as they are constrained to preserve the truth values of an over-determining
basically informational organization. But this preservation is always at the cost of either actively ignoring or being passively blind to possible alternative paths or modes of organization. That's exactly where the maximization of freedom comes into play, namely exploration of these alternative organizations to which basically intelligence unbinds its self-constitutive transformation. Short of epistemic insight and facilities for organizing action, the unipathic
history in which the present should preserve the origin or is either epistemically or socially anchored in the past is destitute of the possibility of any gesture to change. In a unipathic history, any genuine change is always experienced in the form of a disruption or an eruption occasioned by the suppression of alternatives where there is no maximization of freedom as a maximization of alternatives all you can hope for is freedom in terms of pure novelty rather than incremental self transformative historical transformation once and this novelty is always expressed as eruptions from an origin or basically a disruption from a singular future.
The possibilities that such disruptions inaugurate from the perspective of event, eruption, or singularity are so thoroughly discontinuous with present condition that they remain completely intractable and resistant to any prospect of a positive project of transformation and this is what we talked about that basically we cannot have any kind of I we shouldn't we shouldn't understand this orientation toward future and basically at abolishing the primacy of origin as simply again a future eschatology because the ultimate aim is to
use the revisionary, the alternative, this catastrophic import of future in order to cultivate our past trends which the effect of this cultivation always needs to manifest in the present. If it does not manifest in the present, we are basically committing to different pathologies of temporality. If we are simply committing to the present without this catastrophic cultivation of the past trends through the revisionary imports of the future we simply becomes present activism activism activism the most pure
sense at present activism as commitment to the present is precisely a form of localist temporal myopia in which you no longer are able to see either the future nor are capable of basically building on top of those past norms that have been passed on to you namely instantiating agency as a project and this is exactly what activism is activism wants to have an agency without its intelligibility with understanding that the intelligibility of agency its
instantiation as a practical project that can be handed over can be transformed to historical self-consciousness basically moves from one state of transition to another state of transition now to finish this it is in this sense that both the landian techno capitalist singularity and may also absolute contingency or as scientific messianism are same expression of an exceptionally impoverished or unipathic account of history since Since both the mind and philosophy essentially have histories, the impoverishment of history
translates into nothing other than the destitution of thought and the retardation of the mind's evolution as the unity of its meaning and its realization. Crisis only befalls essentially self-conscious creatures endowed with history. What these creatures take themselves to be, their self-conception, is an essential component of what they are themselves, that is, their self-transformation. Once the dynamic link between self-conception and self-transformation is compromised for any reason, either because of a wrong self-conception or a lack of coordination between conception and transformation, pathologies of history set in.
However, since creatures endowed with history are entangled with the environment through which they conceive and transform themselves, their pathological history, namely pathologies in their historical self-consciousness, if they have given rise to one, express themselves in the very environment they engage in understanding and action. The planetary crisis from climate deterioration to regional concentration of human misery are in essence the results of pathologies of history, from the corrupt, stemmed from the corrupted link between self-conception and self-transformation.
Now, the solution to these quandaries lie neither in giving up self-conception, namely adaptation to the order of intelligibilities, and doing away with an amplified understanding, nor in dispensing with the intervening conduct of self-transformation, with the understanding that this intervention conduct is ultimately a product of constituting a history, having a history, and be capable of exploring this history without neither temporal bias of our consciousness, nor practical
bias of basically prioritization of one alternative over another. I wanted to talk about, but there is no time, that now if philosophy basically shows that the ultimate gesture, the ultimate liberating gesture, is that intelligence can have a history and then explore the meaning of having a history. And history, to a certain extent,
And this exploration of this history means that we need to abolish the biases of the origin, natural constitution, determinate power of constitution over function, so on and so forth. One question is still unanswered. And they are those historical biases that are not deriving from an origin per se in the sense of the past. But, as I said, but didn't really elaborate it, are those biases that are coming from an ultimate end. basically a history in which
the ultimate end of history or the ultimate end of time again becomes a bias for the historical self-consciousness and then again leads to different pathologies. Zhongsan talks about this that In fact, even though Hegel and Kant talk about, especially Hegel talk about historical self-consciousness as abolishing these biases entrenched in the temporal understanding of intelligence or geist, that disillusionment and acting according to disillusionment still doesn't sufficiently guarantee pathologies of historical self-consciousness.
Because, precisely because of this implicit anchoring, or not anchoring, implicit bondage of basically self-consciousness or geist to an ultimate goal. So for Zhongsan, this ultimate goal that needs to be practically elaborated, that needs to be addressed, analyzed, and ultimately practically abolished is basically the principle of the perfect good as in contrast with the... Sorry? Sorry? Robotic voice. Very interested. One second.
pathologies of self-consciousness, those related to the origin or temporal biases of the origin or natural constitution, still there is one, basically, threatening link, And that's the bondage of self-consciousness or any kind of practical elaboration of intelligence as a project to a principle of the perfect good, which for Zhongsan is God, really. And that's what Zhongsan considers Zhongsan's critique of Kant, that even though Kant talks about human freedom and comes up with
a blueprint of maximization of human freedom, liberation of human from its self-imposed tutelage, nevertheless, it cannot warranty human happiness. Human happiness ultimately needs to be guaranteed by a god or a theological register. Ultimately, unfortunately we don't have time to go to the Zhongsan that this becomes basically the initial gesture of Zhongsan's project of how to abolish this last you know
dogmatic link that's basically virtue or the intelligibility of agency can only secure its happiness by resorting to a final cause. In this case, God or any divine register. So, I mean, just as for you to kind of like go deep into this, is that he's quite an ambivalent philosopher, but...
And so, and it's very synthetic. It bastardizes different philosophies and creates syncretic holes and not consistent. But I think that there can, I mean, the whole project of Zhongshan's New Confucianism, this idea that sagehood of humanity is the unshackling of human self-consciousness from both the temporal dogmas of the origin and the temporal dogmas of the final cause, namely securing both the virtue and securing the intelligibility of virtue
and securing the intelligibility of happiness. The way that I interpret it, it seems to be that he amplifies, rather than coming up with a new philosophical addendum to all this scenario, he amplifies the Hegelian scenario. That's the only way that we can ultimately warranty a necessary link between happiness and virtue, the intelligibility of happiness and intelligibility of virtue,
is by practically elaborating the intelligibility of the death of God and death of all theologies in every possible, basically, a strata of social practice. And that becomes a kind of arch-Promethean speculative thesis that in opposition to all those philosophies that always say that, well, reason tries to supplant, you know, God or human just simply replaced God. And that Zhongsan wants to show that this very argument is in fact pathological
precisely because it drives its power from these temporal dogmas that do not allow you to see that human is an autonomous agent, is capable of constituting history, but also is capable of securing not only the intelligibility of its virtue, but also is capable of securing the intelligibility of its happiness. Because its happiness is in fact coming from the point that there is no such a thing as God. There is no such a thing as basically a final cause that can warrant your happiness. Ultimately, that's what we talk about. It seems like it that Jung-sen's principle of New Confucianism
is really the final coupling between the Hegelian thesis of historical self-consciousness and ultimate nihilism. which he shows that rather than being a source of meaninglessness, disarray, actually it is the foundation of human moral philosophy and should be practically elaborated. And the first step for him is, you know, he argues that the first step is to take in the quest of highest good is the abolishment of God and dissolution of the principle of the perfect good. Perfect good is the order of the final causes or the divine as being the register of ultimate good.
The death of all theology is not an end. It is merely a beginning for the realization of an end in itself. Yet disbelief in God or the theoretically articulated atheism atheism is not sufficient for the complete historical dissolution of the principle of the perfect good and I'll and the coupling of virtue and happiness both being the products up the intelligibility of agency as a project for the abolishment of God is not a matter of belief but a practical commitment and practical elaboration and that's this is exactly what Jung San talks about, you know, that can,
that ultimately Western philosophy comes to a state of disbelief with regard to God. It does not practically elaborate the intelligibility of disbelief into its social practices. Hence, it cannot ultimately integrate coherently virtue and happiness. to erase the last vestiges of God one cannot just impede faith with understanding or theoretical reason what ought to practically elaborate it toward thorough going actualization only the integration of the quest for truth under the auspices of theoretical reason unshackled from any account of givenness
and the quest for good under the aegis of practical reasoning augmented by the demand for the better, and that's the self-cultivating projects of agency, can actualize the abolishment of God. But the full integration of cognitive-based practices and ethical practices, truth-oriented procedures and goodness-oriented approaches, conceptual rationality and rational ethics, is the necessary condition for the establishment of the link between truth and goodness as an autonomous self-reinforcing loop. But the autonomous positive feedback loop between truth and goodness is the site of a self-realizing intelligence. And that's for Zhongsan,
social sagehood understood as a self-apprehending intelligence is one that is capable of integrating its virtue, namely its endeavor for self-cultivation, to happiness, namely linking the utilities to good in itself. With the good in itself being, as I said, in the very historic sense, being the self-cultivation or the self-realization of intelligence, of the agency.
Accordingly, if the self-realizing intelligence is what functionally characterizes God, then the practical elaboration of disbelief in God by integrating the conceptual program of understanding and the ethical pursuit of the better into a self-cultivating project is tantamount to the realization of intelligence and respectively it counts as the functional equivalence of becoming a human. God. And that's Zhongsan's main speculative thesis. He does not talk about it explicitly, but he talks about social sagehood. In order to become, you don't need to
have faith in God in order to become God. And in fact, the very project of self-cultivation is the establishment of what he calls a social sagehood. because sagehood, from the perspective of ethics, is for you to be able to articulate an adequate and autonomous link between your instrumental endeavors and the good in itself. And the good in itself needs to be in your autonomous practices. It needs to be basically instantiated and established by you yourself, basically by the project of the agency rather than by a third party.
So this is, unfortunately, we couldn't go into new Confucianism and see how Zhongshan talks about this. But nevertheless, this is some kind of a point of entry for a research project of is there any way to, you know, kind of politically draw on this, you know, on this speculative thesis, namely establishing an adequate link between virtues or practical projects and happiness, good in itself.
in order to, precisely in order to, as I said last session, because the ultimate goal of this adequate linkage between the two, between virtual and happiness, is to constitute a hegemonic project, a project that's rather than being simply the hegemony of utilities, but it's the hegemony of rational ends, ends, whose effectuation can be sensed, can be approached by the project of agency, rather than being rewarded or rather than being warranted from, you know, a kind of a divine future,
a future divine, a final cause. So in this sense, the hegemonic project not only abolishes the determining influences of the origin over the present, but also liberates the upper bound of intelligence. In so far as what drives me, what drives intelligence to perpetuate its own self-cultivation, it becomes a circular, basically, agenda. It becomes almost a tautological, that's exactly what the autonomy of intelligence is.
That intelligence endorses nothing but intelligence, and self-cultivation is really the name of tautology. Okay, before I come up with some sort of final remark, let's have any question. I know that we passed a lot since we have been talking for three hours, but this is the final session, so we can have some. Questions? I mostly think I need lunch.
Me too. Me too. Give me a minute, maybe. I appreciate that, Precious of Jiang Sen, just the last 20 minutes or so, identifying that impulse of how do you get not just freedom but welfare, eudaimonia. Yes, absolutely. That's a really helpful lens to think through how he's engaging with Kant. Yes. He seems to be more in line with Hegel. What he wants from Kant is the intellectual intuition.
and what wants from Hegel is the spirit but he argues that Hegel's but I think this is not really true and that's exactly what I said that he's not really adds something completely new what accelerate the Hegelian thesis that a spirit is capable of attaining intellectual intuition. And intellectual intuition is exactly the creating an autonomous link between virtue and happiness. Self-apprehension. Self-apprehension. I'm kind of curious.
I think Keith probably recommended this to you as well, but Adrienne Piper and her sort of book that she developed over the last 30 years on rationality in the self and it's kind of interesting because she seems to be going in a very different direction from what you're pointing out in terms of like she sort of ends drawing on Buddhism and that sort of thing so I think she's seeing you know it's more in terms of like putting an end to desire because she sees sort of you know that desire thing as a kind of like vicious loop and then what you're talking about in relation to Zhongsan is kind of not, there is never really an end to desire or that sort of push for more happiness, further liberation it seems like. But there is always a transformation
of the goals through the process of arriving at the goals. And also transformation of the others. Yeah, this is because, you see, Jongsan is a Confucianist Buddhist. Confucianism, in fact, is very critical of, you know, Buddhism, if you know, and precisely because of the social dimension. And that's why Zhongsan finds more at home with Hegel, because Hegel gives a really, I want to talk about this in no time, gives a very decisive critique of a stoic self-cultivation, precisely because Stoic self-cultivation comes down to a very generic idea of virtue
and a generic idea of happiness that's basically based on the equilibrization of desires. But Jung-san sees projects of self-cultivation in line with the Confucian line of thinking entirely in a social landscape where desires need to be accounted for, libidinal investment need to be accounted for, but also need to be transformed. David, do you have a question?
I think you've answered a lot of... can you hear me? Yes. You've answered a lot of my questions. My main questions were about... because I think this is the point that Mo Dung San is most confusing to me as well, is about that final section about, you know, I'm with him all the way until he talks about perfect teachings and the reconciliation of happiness and virtue, particularly because he has a definition of happiness that involves a certain kind of, um, one second, because his definition of happiness seems to be kind of the affirmation of the existence of, like, the material existence of phenomena or something like that I think it's
it you see Johnson talks about this in terms of a you know no Confucian is different from new Confucianism minoccus and all of the no Confucian that Renaissance Confucianism they talk about this in terms of a coming to terms with nature but nature of more but what did when they say nature is not nature as such, but the nature of the moral agency. Nature of moral agency is different from nature, and then when they're talking about happiness, the reconciliation with that nature is different from nature, and that's why Jung San
is not a Buddhist in the sense of incorporating other sentient beings. mind expands, realizes itself, the mind expands, becomes mind only, basically becomes cosmological, unshackles itself from its terrestrial constitution, becomes cosmological, but it does not make this path, this progression towards sagehood through by, you know, in a Buddhist sense, by having some sort of sudden awakening as if I am one with other sentient beings. There is this quote, let me see, I have it here.
It's not from Zhongsan, but it's from... It's from Wyming 2. I mean, just for people, like, most brief way, what we are talking about is that the Confucians believe that normally it is desirable to establish fruitful communication with the transcendent through communal participation. The preferred course of action is to integrate all levels of the community, family, neighborhood, clan, race, nation, world, universe, cosmos, into the process of self-transformation.
The Confucians believed that this gradual process of inclusion is inherent, gradual process of inclusion, rather than the Buddhistic awakening. It is inherent in the project of learning to be fully human. I think this is actually quite an interesting thing that Zhongshan's philosophy is extremely speculative, but that's exactly why it's exciting. But I think that there is, and he knew it, and he always used it as a kind of seducing point for Chinese nationalism, that it actually can yield political reading.
this understanding that what it means to for example re-engineering family re-engineering social domain administrative, even bureaucratic Confucianist bureaucracy through these kinds of model and this is basically what Confucianism ultimately amounts to the transformation that encompasses everything rather than the stoic that is simply the self, the technology of the self. The self of the Confucian is really the social function that Hegel talks about. Actually, that is one question I have for you. This isn't necessarily related to Mo's work, but his last name is Mo, not Tumsan.
But what, in your perspective, I'm curious about your thoughts on something like the possibility of long-term planning, which it seems to me, long-term planning, not necessarily of self-transformation, because it seems to me that planning requires a certain kind of stability and can't take the risk of the possibility of self-transformation. So I'm kind of talking about administrative mentalities or administrative rationalities. I think you see the stability, as I talked about, you were present last session or not? Yeah. Did you watch the, yeah, okay.
I think the problem of stability is not that the stability is real, but it's the stability is the adverse psychological effects of agitating this stability. the psychological and this is exactly where for example I think as I said you need to have you can't really have the just simply the scientific or you know the social engineering sides of it but you need to have a philosophical cultural dimension to be capable of fully infect popular imagination with it. Because stability, as we talked about this,
I mean, stability is not something that needs to be understood as equilibrium. Stability is a dynamic adaptation. When we are talking about dynamic adaptation, meaning precisely you avert the tragic effects of risk by adapting to them, by generic trajectories of time. This is what evolution really is. But we talked about that there is a difference between functional evolution and structural evolution. Now, yes, I understand that still there is a risk of forming through these alternatives. There is a risk of concrete risk of stability,
And that's exactly where we need to have a recourse to that hierarchical structure of complexity of the social domain, to be able to form new organizations that are plastic enough, that do not wobble under, you know, basically any kind of adverse effect, whether it's financial or not. simply nation states in their current configuration are not capable of coping with these kinds of alternatives. Precisely because they don't have the supple or robust organizational structures. That's exactly what Josh was talking about, hedging the risk. But the hedging risk means that you need to re-engineer
both social organization and corporate organization. I don't take me wrong I'm not a no reactionary but I see that some of the outlining concrete agendas that no reactionary people are endorsing are actually good blueprints for making these kinds of supple organizations As for the psychological effect, well, as I said, you need to kind of infect the popular imagination with Seneca's dictum, even bad fortune is fickle.
You're really trying to invite the Marxist to your door with pitchforks and torches. Yes, I think no reaction, and this is why I think that you can just vilify doctrines or ideologies, but you need to actually engage with them. you need to extract the good components and integrate within a hegemonic project. This is exactly, I think, you can be a Marxist.
First of all, if you are a Marxist, then you need to believe in hegemony of historical self-consciousness. And you can't have that kind of hegemony unless you also account for what Hegel calls determinate negation, namely cut organizations and structural functional hierarchies at their joints, be able to revise them, constitute site of a struggle. For that, you need two methodologies, novel methodologies. And in this sense, you can't basically stop engaging engaging with people just because they have a certain ideology that you do not endorse.
What if actually the future belongs to the no reaction rather than the hegemonic Marxism? In fact, if Marxism is really interested in its future, it needs to make sure that it cultivate the positive trends of these kinds of doctrines. That's really encouraging to hear. That's a debate that's been ongoing in a number of my circles where, but not the specifics of Marxism and neo-reactionaries per se, although that has come up, but just the more general principle of if you have someone who has this ideology and it's virulent in a particular social sphere, why is it virulent? either there's some defense mechanism that that group lacks,
or it's meeting some sort of need, or there's some, you know, but you have to examine the cause and figure out what is it. Has it actually lashed upon a good idea that it's presenting in a perverse frame? Or has it lashed upon a legitimate need that was being unanswered by other ideologies? Or, you know, what precisely is going on? Absolutely. This is completely true. Yeah, sure. I mean, that's why we all like Hollywood movies rather than the French artisan ones because they actually, they have credible points. They infect precisely those things that are important to us. We need to exactly, this is the idea of the popular imagination.
What is exactly creates popular imagination? Why is it created? You need to investigate analyzing it in order to be capable of basically cultivating that. I mean, I would very much like to listen to Nick about Bitcoin and, you know, his reactionary thesis on Bitcoin, which I think is quite an interesting thing. I mean, this is exactly precisely, I talked to Pete a little bit about this. I know that Pete has also thought about it, but this is exactly one of those things that is required
for constituting these kinds of alternative choices that weakens the kind of structural hegemony of current organizational configuration in terms of, for example, finance. I read this great quote today from a student in Michigan named Anders Omdat or something, I can't remember his last name, about Nick. He's deciphering pneumogrammatics and stuff, but he says, The arming of the enemy acts as a dynamo, advancing the cultural clock towards apocalypse by forcing liberals to get their shit together. I thought it was a pretty piercing, fun comment.
Another thing that I see that is interesting in your reaction, although at this point it's just like kind of wishy-washy communitarian utopianism, is understanding of states as islands. I know that Yanis Varoufakis also talked about this when he was, you know, serving as a consultant of Valve, you know, that understanding as corporate organizations as autonomous financial islands, basically foreclosed to the financial disturbance of the states.
I think these are quite actually nice, you know, germs of how to conceive more supple structures. I think there's Kim Stanley Robinson in his like Red Mars, Green Mars trilogy, does some interesting stuff sort of with that idea about how corporations basically wind up lending money and like resources and providing sort of public utilities to nation states and then essentially become sort of what they call meta-nats that envelop the sort of function in the state in their overall sort of like structure and function. So it's a kind of, it's an interesting idea and it seems like that's kind of the direction that we're headed at the moment, you know, especially towards the sort of, you know,
financing of third world services and that sort of thing. And I think there was an interesting piece that was, I think John Oliver did recently about tobacco regulation in third world countries and how these sort of corporations will use global trade structures in order to undermine local laws of nation states that are set up for the help of its citizens, but because they don't have the sort of resources in order to fight back against these sort of legal battles, then their local law then begins to fall under the sway of this global legal structure that's manipulated by the corporate powers. Interesting. Interesting. More questions?
Talks, comments, whatever. Should we call it a day and have our lunch? Lunch. Okay. Okay. Yeah. I'm sure there will be more questions afterwards, too. Yeah, okay. I'm going to put the assignment for the final essay on the classroom. And I'm going to start. We can discuss all of these things on the classroom page. I mean, there are, I'm sure, some assignments that I haven't replied to. And also, let's have discussions and maybe keep that board open until the next course, whenever that next course is, either summer or fall or whenever.